The World Conservation Union (IUCN) defined a set of categories for conservation status supported by decision rules based on thresholds of parameters such as distributional range, population size, population history, and risk of extinction. These rules have received international acceptance and have become one of the most important decision tools in conservation biology because of their wide ap...

The recent industrial boom along the Australian coastline has increased concerns about the long term conservation of snubfin dolphins along the Queensland coast. National assessment of the conservation status and management of the Australian snubfin dolphin is currently hindered by the lack of adequate biological and ecological information throughout most of its range. In response to the issue ...

BACKGROUND Concern about the decline of wild salmon has attracted the attention of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN applies quantitative criteria to assess risk of extinction and publishes its results on the Red List of Threatened Species. However, the focus is on the species level and thus may fail to show the risk to populations. The IUCN has adapted the...

Low genetic diversity may be associated with an increase in species' extinction risk (Spielman et al. 2004, Frankham 2005). Still, global conservation assessments do not consider relevant genetic-based estimates for evaluating species threat status. Rather, they rely primarily on changes population abundance and range size, the inherent assumption that intra-specific variability is tightly corr...

The first comprehensive review in five years of the world's more than 600 species of primate found that almost 50 per cent are in danger of becoming extinct, according to the criteria of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Announced at the International Primatology Congress in Edinburgh earlier this month, the report by the world's leading p...