Prompts winter weather advisories as cold air moves in Friday night

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

By the year 2100, half of the world's species could be extinct.  

Future generations may not even know what they're missing.

 wants to preserve what he can, even if it's only through photographs. In a project dubbed 

 Sartore has set out to document every one of the world's 12,000 captive species — those living in preserves, zoos and other locations under human care around the world.

A selection from his thousands of photographs has been compiled in a new book: "The Photo Ark: One Man's Quest to Document the World's Animals." Four hundred creatures are included: a blue waxbill, a banded sea star, a pileated gibbon, a clouded leopard, a side-striped palm pit viper, a white-bellied pangolin, a spectral tarsier, a veiled chameleon and more.

He started the project 12 years ago and hopes to finish it in another 12. The news often delivers reminders to keep up the pace: Several creatures he's photographed have since gone extinct — and now exist only in records like "The Photo Ark."

Sartore hopes the book will spark action, encouraging people to take steps to preserve the species pictured in the book, and the species in their own backyards. 

If you find yourself marveling at the biodiversity that's slipping away, it can be easier to act than you think, Sartore said. Love butterflies? Plant milkweed. Monarch-friendly environments have been decimated, but planting milkweed helps make the monarch migration possible. 

Sartore knows his work will outlive him, and he hopes his call for action does too. "Long after I am dead," he writes in the book's introduction, "these pictures will continue to go to work every day to save species."

Gallery

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Photos

Photo Galleries

Tracy Mumford

Author

National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore is attempting to document as many species as he can. He just photographed his 6,000th animal this spring.

Oncilla at Parque Jaime Duque near Bogota, Colombia.

Joel Sartore | National Geographic

Snowy owl at the New York State Zoo in Watertown, N.Y.

A two-headed yellow-bellied slider at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, S.C.

A springbok mantis (Miomantis caffra) at the Auckland Zoo.

Gang-gang cockatoo (Callocephalon fimbriatum) in Queensland, Australia.

A rare red uakari monkey, Cacajao calvus, at Los Angeles Zoo.

Photos: Documenting the world's animals in 'The Photo Ark'

Go Deeper.

Like this?