Using data for 25,780 species categorized on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, we present an assessment of the status of the world’s vertebrates. One-fifth of species are classified as Threatened, and we show that this figure is increasing: On average, 52 species of mammals, birds, and amphibians move one category closer to extinction each year. However, this overall pattern conceals the impact of conservation successes, and we show that the rate of deterioration would have been at least one-fifth again as much in the absence of these. Nonetheless, current conservation efforts remain insufficient to offset the main drivers of biodiversity loss in these groups: agricultural expansion, logging, overexploitation, and invasive alien species

A broader taxonomic base to threatened species assessments will enable better conservation and policy decisions.

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showed that dogs, like infants but unlike wolves, make perseverative search errors that can be explained by the use of ostensive cues from the experimenter. We suggest that a simpler learning process, local enhancement, can account for errors made by dogs.The comments by Fiset and Marshall-Pescini et al. raise important methodological issues and propose alternative accounts for our fi nding of perseverative search errors in dogs. Not denying that attentional processes and local enhancement are involved in such object search tasks, we provide here new evidence and argue that dogs' behavior is affected by a combination of factors, including specifi c susceptibility to human communicative signals.

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