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The Sampled Red List Index for Plants

Assessing the conservation rating for Coffea humbertii - GIS algorithms automatically generate values for Extent of Occurrence, Area of Occupancy and number or sub-populations from a database of herbarium specimens.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species summarises information on the taxonomy, conservation status and distribution of species for the world’s major groups of plants and animals. The Red List uses the IUCN Categories of conservation status (Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Extinct/Extinct in the Wild) to categorise species, subspecies, and even selected subpopulations on a global scale in order to highlight taxa at risk of extinction, and thereby promote their conservation.

The IUCN Red List can be used to indicate whether the conservation status of a species or group of species is getting better or worse. This is done by comprehensively assessing the conservation status of these species at regular intervals and documenting genuine changes as species move through the IUCN Categories. The Red List Index is a development of the Red List which incorporates these changes in Red List status into a single quantifiable measure.

This approach has been applied to birds and amphibians and in both cases demonstrates a continuous and significant decline. Ideally, all major taxonomic groups could be comprehensively assessed at regular intervals, but this has proved to be impractical due to the number of species in the larger groups, and the lack of up-to-date taxonomic and distribution information about many of these species. The IUCN Sampled Red List Index (SRLI) is therefore being developed to address this problem by selecting a representative sample of the world’s better-known species groups and monitoring them over time. The SRLI will enable the information held in the Red Lists to be analysed to produce the first comprehensive indicator of the status of global biodiversity.

The development of the Red List Index and the criteria by which species are categorised is being co-ordinated by the Institute of Zoology at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), which is also developing the SRLI. RBG Kew has been approached to co-ordinate the production of IUCN conservation assessments for the plant species selected for the list.

The aim of this project will be to select approximately 1,200 species for each of bryophytes, ferns and their allies, gymnosperms, monocots and dicots and preliminary, GIS-based conservation assessments will be carried out for each of these. Full IUCN conservation assessments will then be carried out for those species identified as threatened. The primary output of this project will therefore be a representative assessment of the global status of plant diversity; it will highlight areas and taxa of particular conservation concern, and will be used to identify trends in conservation status in different parts of the world for setting conservation priorities. Additional outcomes will be a series of papers describing the methodology and progress involved in producing the index. Initially this project is planned to run for three years, although for tracking future trends in the status of plant diversity the project will have to continue beyond this.

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