IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Butchart, S. | |
| Using the IUCN Red List Criteria to assess species with declining populations | |
| 2003 Conservation Biology (17): 1200-1201 | |
The World Conservation Union ( IUCN) Red List categories and criteria provide an explicit, objective, quantitative framework for classifying the risk of global extinction for any species. The criteria provide quantitative thresholds for population size, trend, range size, and modeled probability of extinction. These are used to assign species to categories of extinction risk that can be compared between different taxa ( World Conservation Union 2001). They have received international acceptance as decision tools in conservation biology because of their wide applicability, objectivity, and simplicity of use (Ak‡akaya et al. 2000). Dunn (2002) applied the red list criteria to data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey ( BBS; Sauer et al. 2001) and identified 41 Canadian breeding species that apparently qualified as threatened because of rapidly declining populations (she also applied these data to the British Trust for Ornithology conservation alert levels, but these are not discussed here). Dunn then argued that the majority of qualifying species were not candidates for immediate intervention to halt or reverse declines and concluded that unevaluated population decline should not be used as a sole criterion for identifying species of conservation interest or for determining what conservation action is most needed. Dunn was quite correct in these conclusions, but her argument and analysis leading to them are mistaken for three reasons. |
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