IUCN database a great resource for conservation
WE hear a lot about plants and animals said to be facing extinction, but who decides which species are doing well and which are sliding down the slippery slope towards extinction? Who makes these decisions and what criteria do they use to reach their conclusions?
The body that decides is the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a worldwide organisation with its headquarters in Cambridge, England. The organisation has some 1,300 members ranging from governments to non-governmental organisations large and small, scientific and academic institutions and business associations.
The IUCN has been guiding nature conservation since 1964. It has drawn up strict criteria for assessing the conservation status of life forms. Using these strict criteria, more than 76,000 species have been assessed to date; the aim is to assess at least 160,000 by the year 2020. Meeting that goal will provide the most up-todate indication of the health of the world’s biodiversity to guide critical conservation action.
Life forms are said to be ‘Extinct’ when there are no known individuals remaining. The IUCN category ‘Extinct in the wild’ includes life forms known only to survive in captivity, or as a naturalized population outside its historic range.
Assuming there is enough data to make assessments of their risk of extinction, life forms surviving in the wild are regarded as being of ‘Least concern’ if they are widespread and abundant or, otherwise, ‘ Threatened’ or ‘Near threatened’. Threatened species are further subdivided into three groups: ‘Vulnerable’, ‘Endangered’ and ‘Critically endangered’.
From sets of assessments for various groups of plants and animals lists of threatened species are drawn up. These lists are known as ‘Red Lists’. The IUCN red list database, founded in 1964, is the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species and the IUCN is the world’s main authority on the conservation status of species.
To feed into the global database, regional Red Lists are produced by countries or organizations assessing the risk of extinction to species within their country or political management unit. Our National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) has published ten Red Lists to date covering water beetles, non-marine molluscs, terrestrial mammals, butterflies, amphibia, reptiles and freshwater fish, damselflies and dragonflies, mayflies, bryophytes, macro moths and vascular plants. These are all freely available on the NPWS website.
To keep things fresh, the IUCN aims to have the category of every species re-evaluated every five years if possible, or at least every ten years.