The lifestyle and culture category sees Gelf Alderson’s River Cottage Great Roasts (Bloomsbury) face Cold War Steve’s satirical annual (Constable), Katherine May’s Wintering (Rider), Anthony Penrose’s Lee Miller: Photographs (Thames & Hudson), Alice Vincent’s Why Women Grow (Canongate) and Bee Wilson’s The Secret of Cooking (Fourth Estate). To overcome these issues, Australia's biodiversity information needed to be brought together and made easily available in the one place. Building a collaborative tool for sharing and analysing Australia's biodiversity information The Siberian sturgeon is an endangered species because its total population has declined between 50 and 80 percent during the past 60 years (three generations of sturgeon). Overfishing, poaching, and dam construction have caused this decline. Pollution from mining activities has also contributed to abnormalities in the sturgeon’s reproductive system.

We meet those who are engaged in preventing these species from being driven to extinction and hear their stories of success and sometimes of frustration. The interviews were carried out by Zoom (a phrase that wouldn’t have meant much to me a few years ago) as the research was done over the covid period. This is a good model – does the author pull it off? She does. I really like sharks. I love misunderstood creatures. If I can convince one person who reads the book to love glow-worms as much as orangutans, I’ll be very happy. Because they’re not the most attractive animals in the daytime. But at night, when they light up, is there anything more magical than that? You’ve got these fairy lights twinkling at you. How amazing is that, that you can create light in your abdomen? What a beautiful thing to be able to do. Trying to imagine what it’s like to live as a glow-worm is more intriguing to me than trying to imagine what it’s like to live as an orangutan.” An endangered species’ extent of occurrence is less than 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles). An endangered species’ area of occupancy is less than 500 square kilometers (193 square miles). The ALA is funded by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).Development can also endanger species indirectly. Some species, such as fig trees of the rain forest, may provide habitat for other species. As trees are destroyed, species that depend on that tree habitat may also become endangered. Tree crowns provide habitat in the canopy, or top layer, of a rainforest. Plants such as vines, fungi such as mushrooms, and insects such as butterflies live in the rain forest canopy. So do hundreds of species of tropical birds and mammals such as monkeys. As trees are cut down, this habitat is lost. Species have less room to live and reproduce. A species is classified as endangered when its population has declined between 50 and 70 percent. This decline is measured over 10 years or three generations of the species, whichever is longer. The amount of research that has gone into each and every species chapter is astonishing and the stories are engaging, with individual conservationists input and expert commentary being effortlessly woven into the tales of the species they are involved with. The result is that we are given a glimmer of hope that with the excellent work of committed people like this around the world, our endangered species may yet be saved. Non-Fiction sees Brady’s Strong Female Character (Brazen) battle it out against Stu Hennigan’s Ghost Signs (Bluemoose), Mikaela Loach’s It’s Not That Radical (DK), Megan McCubbin’s An Atlas of Endangered Species (Two Roads), Annabel Sowemimo’s Divided (Wellcome Collection) and Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People (Cornerstone).

Classifying a species as endangered has to do with its range and habitat, as well as its actual population. For this reason, a species can be of least concern in one area and endangered in another. The gray whale, for instance, has a healthy population in the eastern Pacific Ocean, along the coast of North and South America. The population in the western Pacific, however, is critically endangered. The Atlas of Living Australia is helping us gain a better understanding of Australia's unique biodiversity.Hexham Book Group's meets on the second Tuesday of the month at 7.30pm in Scott's Café at the Forum Cinema, Hexham. The one thing I still don’t understand is how a person loves all wildlife equally – it seems as random as loving all people equally. Surely, even within the 20 endangered species of her book, let alone the assembled life forms of the Earth, she has a preference? But you could make your own choice from quite a lot of mammals, some birds, an amphibian, a fish, an echinoderm, a mollusc and that plant. The spread includes well-known and not-so-well-known species and a smattering of marine species as well as terrestrial and aquatic ones. The Bolivian chinchilla rat ( Abrocoma boliviensis) is a rodent found in a small section of the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia. It is critically endangered because its extent of occurrence is less than 100 square kilometers (39 square miles).