Torricelli Mountains, a tiny mountain range in northern Papua New Guinea, is estimated to host roughly 4% of the world’s known species, many found nowhere else on Earth, Mongabay’s John Cannon reported in March.
“I mean, for 0.003% of the world’s land area — it’s a ‘wow’ factor for me,” Jim Thomas, CEO of the Tenkile Conservation Alliance (TCA), told Cannon. “I’m so lucky to be working here.”
Tim Flannery of the Australian Museum in Sydney told Mongabay that PNG’s Torricelli Mountains and its immensely rich biodiversity emerged as a result of slow geological processes.
“It was only that slow development of understanding of the geological history of [the Torricelli Mountains] that we started to make sense of this exceptional richness that we were discovering up there,” Flannery told Mongabay.
Flannery himself has described four species of tree kangaroos while surveying the island of New Guinea. Three of them coexist on the Torricelli Mountains. But before Thomas and his wife Jean started TCA in 2003, two of those species, the tenkile (Dendrolagus scottae) and the weimang (D. pulcherrimus), had been hunted to near extinction.
Cannon writes that experts like Flannery and Jane Goodall credit the TCA for bringing education, health services and economic opportunities to the communities in the Torricellis, while reducing hunting through an agreed-upon hunting moratorium. Although both the tenkile and weimang are still listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, TCA’s surveys show the marsupials’ populations are growing.
However, the unique landscape is facing increasing threats due to logging and road construction, Cannon writes.
TCA had filed a proposal to establish the Torricelli Mountain Range Conservation Area, but it hasn’t seen any government action since 2008, likely because of the political influence of the logging industry, Thomas told Mongabay in a 2022 podcast.
Satellite data from Global Forest Watch show that from 2012-2023, the mountain range lost 2% of primary forest cover. And in 2024, logging road expansion accelerated, Cannon found.
Using IUCN data, University of Cambridge postdoctoral research associate Alison Eyres at Mongabay’s request used a new risk-of-extinction tool to find that the Torricelli Mountains would rank in the top 1% of areas with the most species extinctions over the next 100 years under the worst-case scenario of all of the forests being razed.
Although a complete wipeout is highly unlikely, Cannon reported that it highlights the species susceptible to extinction. This includes the norther glider (Petaurus abidi), which hasn’t been seen since 2007, and several amphibians living at higher elevations. Many species remain listed as data deficient by the IUCN, and many more await discovery.
To expand surveys of the region’s biodiversity, the TCA has now equipped local women with mobile phones, so they can take photos of wildlife they come across.
Read the full article here.
Banner image of a weimang (Dendrolagus pulcherrimus) in Lumi, Papua New Guinea, by John Cannon/Mongabay.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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