• DOI:10.1007/S10750-020-04385-W
• Corpus ID: 224884712

The conservation status of the world’s freshwater molluscs

@article{Bhm2020TheCS,
  title={The conservation status of the world’s freshwater molluscs},
  author={Monika B{\"o}hm and Nadia Dewhurst-Richman and Mary B. Seddon and Sophie Ledger and Christian Albrecht and David J. Allen and Arthur E. Bogan and Jay Cordeiro and Kevin S Cummings and Annabelle Cuttelod and Gustavo Darrigran and William Darwall and Zolt{\'a}n Feh{\'e}r and Claudine Gibson and Daniel L. Graf and Frank K{\"o}hler and Manuel Lopes‐Lima and Guido Pastorino and Kathryn E. Perez and Kevin G. Smith and Dirk van Damme and Maxim V. Vinarski and Ted von Proschwitz and Thomas von Rintelen and David C. Aldridge and Neelavara Ananthram Aravind and Prem Bahadur Budha and Cristhian Clavijo and Do Van Tu and Olivier Gargominy and Mohamed Ghamizi and Martin Haase and Craig Hilton‐Taylor and Paul D. Johnson and {\"U}mit Kebap{\'c}i and Jasna Lajtner and Charles N. Lange and Dwayne A. W. Lepitzki and alberto Mart{\'i}nez-ort{\'i} and Evelyn A. Moorkens and Eike Neubert and Caroline M. Pollock and Vincent Pri{\'e} and Canella Radea and Rina Ram{\'i}rez and Marian A. Ramos and Sonia B. Santos and Rajko Slapnik and Mikhail O. Son and Anna-Sofie Stensgaard and Ben Collen},
  journal={Hydrobiologia},
  year={2020},
  volume={848},
  pages={3231-3254}
}

• M. Böhm, N. Dewhurst-Richman, +48 authors B. Collen
• Published 12 September 2020
• Environmental Science
• Hydrobiologia

With the biodiversity crisis continuing unchecked, we need to establish levels and drivers of extinction risk, and reassessments over time, to effectively allocate conservation resources and track progress towards global conservation targets. Given that threat appears particularly high in freshwaters, we assessed the extinction risk of 1428 randomly selected freshwater molluscs using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria, as part of the Sampled Red List Index project. We show that close to one-third of species in our sample are estimated to be threatened with extinction, with highest levels of threat in the Nearctic, Palearctic and Australasia and among gastropods. Threat levels were higher in lotic than lentic systems. Pollution (chemical and physical) and the modification of natural systems (e.g. through damming and water abstraction) were the most frequently reported threats to freshwater molluscs, with some regional variation. Given that we found little spatial congruence between species richness patterns of freshwater molluscs and other freshwater taxa, apart from crayfish, new additional conservation priority areas emerged from our study. We discuss the implications of our findings for freshwater mollusc conservation, the adequacy of a sampled approach and important next steps to estimate trends in freshwater mollusc extinction risk over time.