Extinct and endangered animals since 1500
How a term shapes our perception of wild plants—and why some supposed “weeds” are now themselves under threat. “How to get rid of ground elder,” “Strategies for controlling thistles,” “How to eliminate weeds from your lawn for good,” or “How to get rid of weeds forever”: As gardening season begins,
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At first glance, it sounds like good news: in many European habitats, there are now locally more plant species than in the past. An international study led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg analyzed 57,390 vegetation time series from across Europe. In total, 199,282 individual vegetation surveys were included; some time
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Dandelions, daisies, stinging nettles or sparrows—many people can still name these species. But what about the plants and birds that are typical of meadows, pastures, field edges and arable fields? A new study by the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) on species knowledge shows that many characteristic species
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The current nationwide Red List of Germany’s ferns and flowering plants, published in 2018, shows how profoundly the country’s flora has already changed: more than a quarter of the assessed species and subspecies are threatened. In Germany, 65 taxa are even considered extinct or no longer found—equivalent to 1.8% of
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For some plant species, fewer than ten mature wild plants remain in nature—sometimes even just a single individual. Such species show how far a decline can go: habitats shrink, populations break apart, and in the end only isolated plants remain, their survival often depending on chance. 15 plant species with
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Many people barely notice plants consciously. On a theater stage, they would in a sense be the backdrop, while animals would stand in the foreground as the actual actors. Plants often appear only as a “green mass”, not as living beings in their own right, with individual species, complex adaptations
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Whether rats on tropical islands, introduced snails in the Pacific, or feral cats in remote bird colonies – invasive alien species (IAS) can throw entire ecosystems off balance and push animal and plant species to the brink of extinction. In 2023, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
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When the Dutch navigator Jakob Roggeveen reached the coast of a remote island in the South Pacific on Easter Sunday in 1722 as the first Western European to do so, he must have been surprised. Before him lay a subtropical volcanic island—but instead of the dense forests one would expect
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The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) presented a new update of the Red List of Threatened Species on 10 October 2025 – this time at the World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi. The updated list now includes 172,620 species worldwide, among them 48,646 classified as threatened and 935
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Pesticides are used worldwide in modern agriculture to combat undesirable organisms—so-called pests—and secure crop yields. But these chemical crop protection products do not act only on the intended target organisms; they also harm a wide range of plants, animals and microorganisms that are essential to ecological balance. A comprehensive study,
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