New York, Jan 21 (IANS): Climate change has threatened the population of the planet's most endangered chimpanzee sub-species, researchers report.

The Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee is the most endangered of all chimpanzee sub-species in the world, with only about 6,000 individuals estimated in the wild.

The Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee is perhaps the least studied of all chimpanzee sub-species.

"We were surprised to see that the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees living in the savannah-woodland habitat of central Cameroon are under the most immediate threat of climate change, and may completely lose their habitat within our lifetime," said first author Paul Sesink Clee, graduate research fellow at Drexel University in the US.

The team predicted the mountainous rainforest habitat could disappear almost entirely under the worst case scenario by 2080.

With roughly half of the 6,000 Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees existing in the ecotone habitat of central Cameroon, the results suggest that this sub-species of chimpanzee is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

The research was published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.