Biodiversité

This month’s NAPA 166 is all about the new MOOC session starting 12 September. There are some key dates to remember including a couple of webinars with MOOC speakers. This NAPA also features to stories from the field, where learners tell us how the MOOCs have helped them in their work.

Des chercheurs ont entraîné une intelligence artificielle (IA) afin d’attribuer un score esthétique à 2400 espèces de poissons de récifs coralliens ou rocheux. Résultat : les poissons que nous jugeons les « moins beaux » sont ceux qui présentent, collectivement, la plus grande variété de caractéristiques écologiques et ont la plus longue histoire évolutive. Ce sont aussi les plus menacés…

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is essential for practical and theoretical efforts to protect biodiversity. However, species classified as “Data Deficient” (DD) regularly mislead practitioners due to their uncertain extinction risk. Here we present machine learning-derived probabilities of being threatened by extinction for 7699 DD species, comprising 17% of the entire IUCN spatial datasets. Our predictions suggest that DD species as a group may in fact be more threatened than data-sufficient species. We found that 85% of DD amphibians are likely to be threatened by extinction, as well as more than half of DD species in many other taxonomic groups, such as mammals and reptiles.