Estado de conservação e ameaças à fauna e à flora do Brasil

Abstract

Biodiversity loss is one of the main environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, which is continually compounded by the intensification of threats. Red Lists are tools that inform and guide conservation efforts around the world. Their divergences at global and regional levels can help to understand how threats affect different taxa at different scales. Within this context, this study aimed to test whether there are divergences in regional (Brazil) and global extinction risk assessments of threatened Brazilian fauna and flora, to identify which animal taxa have the most divergent assessments and to characterize the main global threats to the threatened fauna and flora of Brazil. Both threatened Brazilian flora and fauna show differences in the assessments of regional and global extinction risk, which is twice as high for animals than for plants. This is mainly due to a greater national level of threat to birds and mammals and, to a lesser extent, to cartilaginous fish and amphibians. Assessment differences most commonly reflect that regional assessments tend to indicate a higher level of extinction risk than the global one. The main global threats to Brazilian flora and fauna are agricultural activities and overexploitation of biological resources, which affect populations with rapid and slow, but significant, declines.