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The lives lost and economic costs of viral zoonotic pandemics have steadily increased over the past century. Prominent policymakers have promoted plans that argue the best ways to address future pandemic catastrophes should entail, “detecting and containing emerging zoonotic threats.” In other words, we should take actions only after humans get sick. We sharply disagree. Humans have extensive contact with wildlife known to harbor vast numbers of viruses, many of which have not yet spilled into humans. We compute the annualized damages from emerging viral zoonoses. We explore three practical actions to minimize the impact of future pandemics: better surveillance of pathogen spillover and development of global databases of virus genomics and serology, better management of wildlife trade, and substantial reduction of deforestation. We find that these primary pandemic prevention actions cost less than 1/20th the value of lives lost each year to emerging viral zoonoses and have substantial cobenefits.

The Red List classification of species’ risks of extinction has seriously underestimated the risks of many species., The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List classifies species according to their risk of extinction, informing global to local conservation decisions. Unfortunately, important geospatial data do not explicitly or efficiently enter this process. Rapid growth in the availability of remotely sensed observations provides fine-scale data on elevation and increasingly sophisticated characterizations of land cover and its changes. These data readily show that species are likely not present within many areas within the overall envelopes of their distributions. Additionally, global databases on protected areas inform how extensively ranges are protected. We selected 586 endemic and threatened forest bird species from six of the world’s most biodiverse and threatened places (Atlantic Forest of Brazil, Central America, Western Andes of Colombia, Madagascar, Sumatra, and Southeast Asia). The Red List deems 18% of these species to be threatened (15 critically endangered, 29 endangered, and 64 vulnerable). Inevitably, after refining ranges by elevation and forest cover, ranges shrink. Do they do so consistently? For example, refined ranges of critically endangered species might reduce by (say) 50% but so might the ranges of endangered, vulnerable, and nonthreatened species. Critically, this is not the case. We find that 43% of species fall below the range threshold where comparable species are deemed threatened. Some 210 bird species belong in a higher-threat category than the current Red List placement, including 189 species that are currently deemed nonthreatened. Incorporating readily available spatial data substantially increases the numbers of species that should be considered at risk and alters priority areas for conservation.

Background A principal function of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is to “perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity.” In December 2013, its second plenary session approved a program to begin a global assessment in 2015. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and five other biodiversity-related conventions have adopted IPBES as their science-policy interface, so these assessments will be important in evaluating progress toward the CBD’s Aichi Targets of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020. As a contribution toward such assessment, we review the biodiversity of eukaryote species and their extinction rates, distributions, and protection. We document what we know, how it likely differs from what we do not, and how these differences affect biodiversity statistics. Interestingly, several targets explicitly mention “known species”—a strong, if implicit, statement of incomplete knowledge. We start by asking how many species are known and how many remain undescribed. We then consider by how much human actions inflate extinction rates. Much depends on where species are, because different biomes contain different numbers of species of different susceptibilities. Biomes also suffer different levels of damage and have unequal levels of protection. How extinction rates will change depends on how and where threats expand and whether greater protection counters them. Advances Recent studies have clarified where the most vulnerable species live, where and how humanity changes the planet, and how this drives extinctions. These data are increasingly accessible, bringing greater transparency to science and governance. Taxonomic catalogs of plants, terrestrial vertebrates, freshwater fish, and some marine taxa are sufficient to assess their status and the limitations of our knowledge. Most species are undescribed, however. The species we know best have large geographical ranges and are often common within them. Most known species have small ranges, however, and such species are typically newer discoveries. The numbers of known species with very small ranges are increasing quickly, even in well-known taxa. They are geographically concentrated and are disproportionately likely to be threatened or already extinct. We expect unknown species to share these characteristics. Current rates of extinction are about 1000 times the background rate of extinction. These are higher than previously estimated and likely still underestimated. Future rates will depend on many factors and are poised to increase. Finally, although there has been rapid progress in developing protected areas, such efforts are not ecologically representative, nor do they optimally protect biodiversity. Outlook Progress on assessing biodiversity will emerge from continued expansion of the many recently created online databases, combining them with new global data sources on changing land and ocean use and with increasingly crowdsourced data on species’ distributions. Examples of practical conservation that follow from using combined data in Colombia and Brazil can be found at www.savingspecies.org and www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3zjeJW2NVk .

Theories abound as to why the tropics harbor such amazing biodiversity compared to higher latitudes. In their Perspective, Pimm and Brown discuss the pros and cons of three popular hypotheses.

China has recently undertaken a sweeping transfer of power to a younger generation of leaders. Liu et al . address three major issues that need to be considered by the new leaders as they establish their policies for biodiversity conservation: The process of reserve establishment needs evaluation and the administrative system is not effectively coordinated, reserves are insufficiently funded and seriously understaffed, and more attention to local residents is required.

Extinctions stand out amid the global catalog of environmental insults. Extinctions are irreversible and their rate is high and accelerating. Preventing them, however, is neither impractical nor economically impossible. It does require innovative strategies. Implementation raises a number of controversial questions, which are addressed here.

If we can only preserve some of the Earth9s land, how do we decide which bits to save to achieve preservation of the most species? Two reports in this issue of Science ( Ando et al. and van Jaarsveld et al.) and a policy commentary on conservation biology by SoulA© and Sanjayan address this question by presenting new computational methods. In their commentary, Pimm and Lawton discuss the use of these algorithms for making conservation choices.

The California Condor A Saga of Natural History and Conservation. Noel and Helen Snyder. AP Natural World (Academic Press), San Diego, 2000. 432 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-12-654005-5. This account of the biology and conservation of one of the most endangered North American species draws on the authors' extensive experiences in condor research and in the controversies that have attended efforts to assure the birds' future.

To preserve biological diversity, wealthy nations usually save the large and cuddly species that excite the public’s imagination1. This is not necessarily a bad strategy. The relatively large size of these species means that their population densities are low. Consequently, the minimal numbers required for persistence inhabit large areas and many other less charismatic species are protected under their umbrella. Furthermore, large species are often top predators and thus play crucial, so-called keystone roles in the community’s dynamics. Yet such a species-biased approach is not necessarily appropriate for the great majority of animal species that are not furred and feathered, or for plants, or, indeed, for all organisms in species-rich tropical nations deciding on how to allocate land for national parks. The obvious strategy protects areas of greatest diversity. Two recent papers on mammals by Mares in this issue and Pagel et al.2 illustrate the complex biological issues involved in predicting what diversity might remain after future planners have taken a cookie cutter to their wilderness.