Wet Tropics threatened species

Australia’s Wet Tropics is a significant world centre of local endemism and is also a hotspot for threatened species of plants and animals. These attributes were pivotal in the listing of the Wet Tropics as a World Heritage Area in December 1988.

Irreplaceability

A 2013 study, published in the international journal Science, calculated the 'irreplaceability' of individual protected areas, based on data of 173,000 terrestrial protected areas and assessments of 21,500 species on The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in order to assign each protected area a species-based irreplaceability score.

The Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area ranked sixth overall in global irreplaceability on the basis of all species and eighth on the basis of threatened species.

This data was also used in the IUCN publicationTerrestrial Biodiversity and the World Heritage List: Identifying broad gaps and potential candidate sites for inclusion in the natural World Heritage network. Table 4.2 in that report listed the most irreplaceable natural and mixed World Heritage sites currently included on the World Heritage List.

The analysis in this report ranked the Wet Tropics as the second most irreplaceable natural World Heritage site. An abbreviated summary of the results of this study are provided in the below table:

Table 1: The most irreplaceable natural World Heritage sites

You can download a table detailing Wet Tropics species listed as threatened under Queensland legislation and Australian legislation. This table also identifies those threatened species endemic to the Wet Tropics. A general summary is provided in Tables 2 and 3 below:

Table 2: Summary table of Wet Tropics fauna and flora listed under Queensland legislation (the Nature Conservation Act) as of June 2015. Numbers in brackets are the number of species endemic to the Wet Tropics.

Table 3: Summary table of Wet Tropics fauna and flora listed under Australian legislation (the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act) as of June 2015. Numbers in brackets are the number of species endemic to the Wet Tropics.

Other species in decline

In addition to these officially listed threatened species, a number of recent studies have identified a large number of Wet Tropics vertebrate species that have undergone both significant declines in population numbers and significant contractions of their distributional ranges. These findings are based on a program of long-term biodiversity monitoring throughout the Wet Tropics. Additionally, many vertebrate species have also been identified as particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events, with the sudden precipitous declines in populations of some arboreal mammals attributed to recent heat wave events. Another recent report has highlighted the extreme vulnerability of a number of high elevation restricted tree species.

In 2014 IUCN released its World Heritage Outlook 2014: a conservation assessment of all natural World Heritage sites. The Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area’s conservation outlook was assessed as ‘Significant Concern’. The reasons for this concern were listed as 'the insidious and damaging threat posed by invasive plants, animals and diseases, exacerbated by predicted impacts of climate change present a real danger to the continuing integrity of the site’s biodiversity and associated endemic species'.  The report also states that: 'The greatest concern is for the amphibian species within the property, although declines in range extent and population sizes of a number of high altitude bird and mammal species have also been reported'.