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The UN scientific organisation UNESCO has added to its World Heritage List. The sites include sandstone canyons and valleys in Chad, forests sheltering leopards and Asiatic black bears in China, and archaeological ruins and wetlands in Iraq.

The list celebrates locations of outstanding cultural or natural value, such as historically significant architecture and areas that exhibit “exceptional natural beauty”.

About 20 to 30 sites are added each year, with the latest additions bringing the total number to 1052 worldwide. Many are in danger of degradation, especially from the effects of climate change.

Adding an area to the list helps governments and NGOs to preserve it, says Juan Bezaury-Creel at The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.

One of the newly designated sites is the in Mexico — a group of four islands in the eastern Pacific, each the tip of an underwater volcano. The water surrounding the islands hosts whales and sharks that will now be protected, says Bezaury-Creel.

“It’s going to make conservation easier, and it’s going to be easier to mitigate threats that come to the area,” he says.

, a fossil site in south-eastern Newfoundland in Canada, was also among the new inductees. The fossils there are about 580 million years old and don’t resemble any animals living today, says Richard Thomas, a geologist at .

“People tend to call them proto-animals,” Thomas says of the branching-bodied, fern-like organisms. “They weren’t quite animals, but they were definitely on the way there.”

The new designation will boost tourism and may be an economic “shot in the arm” for the region, he says. “Everyone down here is thrilled. It’s the most prestigious designation any fossil site in the world can get.”

Read more: Climate change hits one in six world heritage nature sites