Depending on who you listen to, the number of species that have become extinct on the planet is between 85%-99%. That means, that of all the species, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and insects that once roamed the planet, only a fraction of them remain today, and because of human interference in the natural order of things, those left are dying out 1,000 times faster than they normally would. The good news is that new technologyi is helping conservation make big strides.Here's an example: In 2010, at an army base in Baghdad in Iraq, someone brought U.S. service member Jonathan Trouern-Trend a frog in a plastic bottle. The brightly colored amphibian had been hiding in the latrine. Trouern-Trend was known as the guy who could identify critters. Before releasing the frog in a nearby pond, he uploaded a picture of it onto his mobile app iNaturalist, which connects a worldwide community of people who report sighting of animals and plants online. App users informed him that he'd found a lemon-yellow tree frog, in an area where they had never been seen before. The species' known range had suddenlty expanded.
This kind of citizen science has exploded in recent years thanks to the smartphone. It is giving conservationists hope that new technology can slow extinctions. Conservationists can calculate the extinction rate of the known species by keeping track of how many die out each year. The rapid rate of extinction is mostly due to human-caused habitat destructionb and climate change.
The analysis of conservationists reveals that before humans evolved, less than a single species per million went extinct annually. If the current trend continues, the result might possibly be the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. Crowdsourcing and citizen scientists are helping to keep this from happening.
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