Including environmental niche information to improve IUCN Red List assessments

red - an R package to facilitate species red list assessments according to the IUCN criteria

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List is the most useful database of species that are at risk of extinction worldwide, as it relies on a number of objective criteria and is now widely adopted. The R package red - IUCN Redlisting Tools - performs a number of spatial analyses based on either observed occurrences or estimated ranges. Functions include calculating Extent o...

The Iucn Red List of Threatened Speciestm

Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus) are facing a range of threats that might impact their future population status (see section Threats below). The IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) regards loss of sea-ice habitat due to climate warming as the most serious threat to future Polar Bear survival. We therefore based our Red List assessment on this threat factor only, recognizing that sea-ice condit...

Ambiguity in guideline definitions introduces assessor bias and influences consistency in IUCN Red List status assessments

1 College of Natural Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, UK, 2 Centre for African Conservation Ecology, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 3 Department of Animal and Wildlife Sciences, Centre for Wildlife Management, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa, 4 Endangered Wildlife Trust, Johannesburg, South Africa, 5 Panthera, New York, NY, USA, 6 Depart...

Guidelines for Using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria

Improving generation length estimates for the IUCN Red List

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List classifies species according to their risk of extinction, informing local to global conservation decisions. Here we look to advance the estimation of generation length, which is used as a time-scalar in the Red List as a way of accounting for differences in species' life-histories. We calculated or predicted generation lengt...