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Status

From BIRD: linking the biodiversity community

Categories: Fauna | Flora

The conservation status of a species is an indicator of the likelihood of that species continuing to survive. Many factors are taken into account when assessing the conservation status of an organism: not simply the number remaining, but the overall increase or decrease in the population over time, breeding success rates, known threats, and so on.

The best-known worldwide conservation status listing is the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (http://www.iucn.org) (IUCN) Red List, but many more specialised lists exist, including status determinations issued by all Australian state and federal governments.

For general use, BIRD employs the following categories, which are loosely based on the IUCN categories.

Secure or common: no immediate threat to the survival of the species.
Lower risk: of conservation concern, facing some risk of extinction in the medium to longer term. Divided into three subcategories:
- Least concern: threats exist but are not currently serious.
- Near threatened: close to qualifying as vulnerable but not fully meeting those criteria
- Conservation dependent: would be reclassified at a higher risk level if current conservation measures were to cease.

Vulnerable: faces a high risk of extinction in the medium-term.
Endangered: faces a very high risk of extinction in the near future.
Critical: critically endangered: faces an extremely high risk of extinction in the immediate future.
Extinct in the wild: captive individuals survive, but there is no free-living, natural population.
Extinct: the last remaining member of the species had died, or is presumed to have died beyond reasonable doubt.
Data deficient: there is inadequate information to assess the risk category properly.

For some purposes a formal status categorisation is more appropriate. Where required, this can be often be extracted from one of the searchable databases listed below.

Status

See also: