Wilderness areas, long known for intrinsic conservation value, are far more valuable for biodiversity than previously believed, and if conserved, will cut the world’s extinction risk in half, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

Wilderness areas, long known for intrinsic conservation value, are far more valuable for biodiversity than previously believed, and if conserved, will cut the world’s extinction risk in half, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

Wilderness areas – where human impact has been absent or minimal – are dwindling. The latest maps show over 3 million square kilometres (1.15 million square miles) of wilderness destroyed since the 1990s (an area the size of India), and that less than 20 percent of the world can still be called wilderness. Many of these areas are found outside of national parks and other protected areas. Until know, the direct benefits of wilderness for stopping species extinction were largely unknown.

By taking advantage of the new global biodiversity modelling infrastructure “BILBI” developed at CSIRO, which is able to provide fine-scale estimates of probability of species loss around the globe, and integrating this with the latest human footprint map generated by the University of Queensland (UQ), University of Northern British Colombia and WCS, a collaboration of scientists demonstrated that today many wilderness areas are critical to prevent the loss of terrestrial species in many areas of the world.

Read more at Wildlife Conservation Society

Image: The research showed some wilderness areas, such as areas surrounding Madidi National Park in the Bolivian Amazon, play an extraordinary role in their respective regional contexts, where their loss would drastically reduce the probability of persistence of biodiversity. (Credit: Rob Wallace/WCS)