BY VISHAL GULATI New Delhi, Dec 6 : Contrary to estimations of just 25,000 Asian woolly-necked storks left in nature in south Asia, four to seven years of all-season field surveys in India, Nepal and Myanmar indicate their number could be over 2,00,000, meaning not 'vulnerable' species, say scientists. The woolly-necked stork is a wading bird that lives in a variety of habitats -- ranging from marshes to wetlands and agricultural areas. The findings by a team of scientists led by K.S. Gopi Sundar, Co-chair of the IUCN (Stork, Ibis and Spoonbill) Specialist Group, say the situation for the woolly-necked storks are dire in some countries of south-east Asia where hunting is common. They suggest the IUCN status assessments require some alterations for species like the woolly-necked storks whose global populations are large and healthy, but have small pockets where they are heavily threatened. "One single status for such species prevents conservationists from bringing attention to their plight in the areas where they are much more threatened than in the rest of their range," Gopi, also a Nature Conservation Foundation scientist, told IANS on Sunday. In 2014, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a global umbrella organisation, designated the woolly-necked storks as a globally "Vulnerable" species. This designation signified that the organisation deems the storks to be threatened and that it ranks very high on the list of species whose conservation is most worrisome. This ranking upwards of species is bad news and was a bad sign for India that conditions for this stork species were declining, he said. In a new analysis of its status, several papers have been published in the online publication "SIS Conservation", managed by the IUCN Stork, Ibis and Spoonbill Specialist Group. The scientists collated information from India, Myanmar and Nepal and global-scale analyses for the woolly-necked stork, and the prognosis is quite surprising. "The stork is not as threatened as was made out, and the existing population estimate for the Asian population is a huge under-estimate," he said. According to Gopi, past assessments were biased by reports from south-east Asia where experts opine that ongoing large-scale change of land use is threatening species like the woolly-necked stork which, they contend, requires protected forest areas to survive. The new collection of papers shows a scenario quite the opposite -- the majority of woolly-necked storks in south Asia live on agricultural landscapes and in some countries like Myanmar, there are far more storks outside protected reserves than inside. He cites two important aspects of designating its conservation status. One, that many species of birds have been very poorly studied and understood, but are still given a classification as to their status. Second, that the global focus only on protected forest areas provides a biased picture of how wildlife is faring on the planet. "If birds and other species that are poorly understood are highlighted, it would be possible to carry out focussed ecological work on such species to understand how they were faring. Also, a number of studies from Asia, central America and more recently from Africa, are showcasing the value of agricultural areas for a variety of wild species, including birds like storks," he said. "Clearly, while focus on protected forest ecosystems is required to continue, assuming that areas outside such reserves are not useful for wildlife is incorrect." Field based studies and available information on the Internet have shown that the storks are not only using supposedly-disturbed areas like agriculture fields, they are also using artificial structures such as cell phone towers to nest on, he said. In northern India and lowland Nepal where cereal crops such as rice and wheat are planted, the vast majority of woolly-necked storks have been observed over multiple years of systematic monitoring in multiple locations, were using crop fields. These careful observations also helped authors develop the first, albeit slightly coarse, estimates of populations of woolly-necked storks. Contrary to the 25,000 birds that were guessed to be living in Asia, the estimate for just south Asia is over 2,00,000. Stepping out of the sanctuaries and protected wetlands where most of wildlife research is conducted helped the contributors to realize that the woolly-necked storks were a species that is able to live alongside human activity like farming, Gopi explained. These birds are widely distributed in Kerala where they are using trees along fields, besides cities, for nesting during some seasons. In Assam, they appear to be displaying some very unusual activity. This is the only state where the least number of storks were sighted during the monsoon, the breeding season. It is believed that the relatively severe flooding in Assam forces the birds out of the state during the monsoon, but this understanding requires to be confirmed using actual field studies. Gopi said part of the problem of species status assessments is that it is traditionally done by visiting western scientists who focus most of their attention on protected areas and charismatic large mammals. "Visitors are likely to carry with them biases from their countries such as the US where hunting is legal and wildlife conservation is mostly undertaken with the declaration of reserves where humans are excluded. The situation in a lot of countries in Africa and Asia is not the same and many species of wildlife have the majority of their populations outside protected reserves," he added. (Vishal Gulati can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in) /IANS