Australia is home to some of the most unique wildlife on Earth which consists of 84% of our plants, 83% of our mammals, and 45% of our birds exist nowhere else. Yet since European settlement in 1788, we have lost more mammal species than any other continent. Today, over 1,900 species sit on the federal threatened list. The Threatened Species Index 2024 reveals that on average, their populations have collapsed by 73% since 1985. Amphibians have fared worst of all, down to 97%. This is the story the headline figures don’t tell.

Chart 1: Who’s on the list?

Plants dominate Australia’s threatened species list in sheer numbers, but mammals have the highest proportional extinction rate of any group on Earth. Every bar below represents real species at risk of vanishing forever.

Click legend items to show/hide threat categories. Hover for exact counts.
Source: DCCEEW (2024). Threatened Species and Ecological Communities of National Environmental Significance. data.gov.au

Chart 2: A population in freefall

The Threatened Species Index tracks population abundance over time for monitored species. The baseline is 1.0. A score of 0.38, where threatened mammals now sit, which means average populations are less than 40% of what they were in the mid 1990s.

Click species groups in the legend to compare trends. Dashed line = baseline (no change).
Source: Threatened Species Index 2024. TERN / University of Queensland. tsx.org.au. Values for birds (2021=0.41), mammals (0.55), plants (0.32), amphibians (0.03) from Table A1, TSX 2024 Trend Summary.

Chart 3: What’s killing them?

No single threat is driving Australia’s extinction crisis, it’s a lethal combination. But the mix varies dramatically by species group. Invasive predators (cats and foxes) are the number one killer of mammals. Habitat destruction hits every group. Climate change is rapidly rising up the list.

Hover over each cell to see exact percentages. Darker red = more species in that group face this threat.
Source: Kearney et al. (2019). A national-scale dataset for threats impacting Australia’s imperiled flora and fauna. Ecology and Evolution. PMC8427562

Chart 4: Where is the crisis worst?

Queensland and Western Australia have the highest counts of threatened species which reflects their extraordinary biodiversity, but also the scale of habitat clearing and invasive species pressure in those states. No state or territory is unaffected.

Click legend items to isolate species groups. Hover bars for exact counts per state.
Source: Threatened Species Index 2024, Table 2 & 3. TERN / University of Queensland. tsx.org.au. Values show % change in relative abundance of threatened and near-threatened species 2000–2021. “ID” (insufficient data) states excluded for that group.

Chart 5: Racing against time

Of Australia’s most critically endangered species, 25 are predicted to be extinct within 20 years without urgent action. Each bubble below is a real species which is sized by estimated population, coloured by whether a funded recovery plan is in place. Too many are racing toward zero with no plan at all.

Hover over each bubble for species name, group, population estimate, and recovery plan status. Bubbles further left = fewer years remaining.
Source: Geyle et al. (2021). Pinpointing the threat: Australia’s most-at-risk vertebrates and invertebrates. Pacific Conservation Biology. DCCEEW SPRAT database.

Data note

All data were aggregated from the EPBC Threatened Species List, the Threatened Species Index 2024, and published peer-reviewed studies. Numerical values for Charts 1, 4 were sourced directly from TSX 2024 summary tables and the EPBC Act listings. Charts 3 and 5 draw on Kearney et al. (2019) and Geyle et al. (2021) respectively. Values were summarised and reformatted for visualisation purposes using R.

References

Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. (2024). Threatened species and ecological communities of national environmental significance. https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/threatened-species-state-lists

Geyle, H. M., Tingley, R., Amey, A. P., Cogger, H., Couper, P. J., Cowan, M., & Garnett, S. T. (2021). Pinpointing the threat: Which taxa and threatening processes are most important? Pacific Conservation Biology, 27(2), 116–126. https://doi.org/10.1071/PC20033

Kearney, S. G., Adams, V. M., Fuller, R. A., Possingham, H. P., & Watson, J. E. M. (2019). A national-scale dataset for threats impacting Australia’s imperiled flora and fauna. Ecology and Evolution, 9(22), 13163–13172. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5758

Pedersen, T. L., & Sievert, C. (2024). plotly: Create interactive web graphics via ‘plotly.js’ (R package version 4.10.4) [Computer software]. CRAN. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=plotly

TERN Australia, & The University of Queensland. (2024, December). Australia’s Threatened Species Index 2024: Summary of trends up to 2021. https://tsx.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Threatened_Species_Index_2024_Trend_Summary_20250616.pdf

Wickham, H., Averick, M., Bryan, J., Chang, W., McGowan, L. D., François, R., Grolemund, G., Hayes, A., Henry, L., Hester, J., Kuhn, M., Pedersen, T. L., Miller, E., Bache, S. M., Müller, K., Ooms, J., Robinson, D., Seidel, D. P., Spinu, V., … Yutani, H. (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686

Wickham, H. (2016). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis (2nd ed.). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24277-4

Woinarski, J. C. Z., Braby, M. F., Burbidge, A. A., Coates, D., Garnett, S. T., Fensham, R. J., Legge, S. M., McKenzie, N. L., Silcock, J. L., & Murphy, B. P. (2019). Reading the black book: The number, timing, distribution and causes of listed extinctions in Australia. Biological Conservation, 239, 108261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108261