Measuring Global Trends in the Status of Biodiversity: Red List Indices for Birds

Butchart, Stuart H. M.; Stattersfield, Alison J.; Bennun, Leon; Shutes, Sue M; Akçakaya, H. Reşi̇t; Baillie, Jonathan; Stuart, Simon N.; Hilton‐Taylor, Craig; Mace, Georgina M.

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0020383

Cited by 421 publications

(422 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…(d) National conservation priorities and reporting Our measures have some affinity with the Red List Index (RLI) that has been proposed for monitoring trends of taxonomic groups globally or nationally [37,38] and adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity as one measure to assess progress towards the 2010 targets [39]. The RLI is a compound measure synthesizing the genuine changes (those not resulting from improved knowledge or taxonomic changes) in the Red List status of all species in a taxon.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Future hotspots of terrestrial mammal loss

Visconti

Pressey

Giorgini

et al. 2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

122

116

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Current levels of endangerment and historical trends of species and habitats are the main criteria used to direct conservation efforts globally. Estimates of future declines, which might indicate different priorities than past declines, have been limited by the lack of appropriate data and models. Given that much of conservation is about anticipating and responding to future threats, our inability to look forward at a global scale has been a major constraint on effective action. Here, we assess the geography and extent of projected future changes in suitable habitat for terrestrial mammals within their present ranges. We used a global earth-system model, IMAGE, coupled with fine-scale habitat suitability models and parametrized according to four global scenarios of human development. We identified the most affected countries by 2050 for each scenario, assuming that no additional conservation actions other than those described in the scenarios take place. We found that, with some exceptions, most of the countries with the largest predicted losses of suitable habitat for mammals are in Africa and the Americas. African and North American countries were also predicted to host the most species with large proportional global declines. Most of the countries we identified as future hotspots of terrestrial mammal loss have little or no overlap with the present global conservation priorities, thus confirming the need for forward-looking analyses in conservation priority setting. The expected growth in human populations and consumption in hotspots of future mammal loss mean that local conservation actions such as protected areas might not be sufficient to mitigate losses. Other policies, directed towards the root causes of biodiversity loss, are required, both in Africa and other parts of the world.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Future hotspots of terrestrial mammal loss

Visconti

Pressey

Giorgini

et al. 2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

122

116

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“…Even for the most famous examples of rapid speciation, such as Lake Victoria cichlids, diversifi cation rates are estimated over 100's to 1000's of years, and evidence of 'reverse-speciation' indicates that speciation might not have been complete (Seehausen 2006 ). By contrast, rates of extinction are now estimated at many times background rates (Vitousek et al 1997 ;Butchart et al 2004 ), and are occurring over 10's to 100's of years.…”

Section: Speciation and Extinction As Two Natural Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering the Loss of Evolutionary History: How Does Non-random Extinction Prune the Tree-of-Life?

Yessoufou

Davies

2016

Topics in Biodiversity and Conservation

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Analysing extinction within a phylogenetic framework may seem counter-intuitive because extinction is a priori a non-heritable trait. However, extinction risk is correlated with other traits, such as body size, that show a strong phylogenetic signal. Further, there has been much effort in identifying key traits important for diversifi cation, and recent evidence has demonstrated that the processes of speciation and extinction may be inextricably linked. A phylogenetic approach also allows us to quantify the impact of extinction, for example, as the loss of branches from the tree-of-life. Early work suggested that extinctions might result in little loss of evolutionary history, but subsequent studies indicated that nonrandom extinctions might prune more of the evolutionary tree. Loss of phylogenetic diversity might have ecosystem consequences because functional differences between species tend to be correlated with the evolutionary distances between them. Here we explore how extinction prunes the tree-of-life. Our review indicates that the loss of evolutionary history under non-random extinction (the emerging pattern in extinction biology) might be less pronounced than some previous studies have suggested. However, the loss of functional diversity might still be large, depending on the evolutionary model of trait change. Under a punctuated model of evolution, in which trait differences accrue in bursts at speciation, the number of branches lost is more important than their summed lengths. We suggest that evolutionary models need to be incorporated more explicitly into measures of phylogenetic diversity if we are to use phylogeny as a proxy for functional diversity.

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“…In order to quantify the change in conservation status between one time point and the next, repeat assessments under the same criterion are needed [3], meaning that at any one point in time there will be multiple assessments of the species under different criteria, some of which are fresh assessments under that criterion, others of which are backcast assessments under that criterion to an earlier point in time when that criterion could not previously be applied. The issue of identifying genuine changes in the conservation status of species-the prerequisite for calculating future readings of the SRLI-is thus intimately connected with the issue of backcasting.…”

Section: (C) Identifying Genuine Change and Backcasting Assessmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sampled Red List Index for Plants, phase II: ground-truthing specimen-based conservation assessments

Brummitt

Bachman

Aletrari

et al. 2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The IUCN Sampled Red List Index (SRLI) is a policy response by biodiversity scientists to the need to estimate trends in extinction risk of the world's diminishing biological diversity. Assessments of plant species for the SRLI project rely predominantly on herbarium specimen data from natural history collections, in the overwhelming absence of accurate population data or detailed distribution maps for the vast majority of plant species. This creates difficulties in re-assessing these species so as to measure genuine changes in conservation status, which must be observed under the same Red List criteria in order to be distinguished from an increase in the knowledge available for that species, and thus re-calculate the SRLI. However, the same specimen data identify precise localities where threatened species have previously been collected and can be used to model species ranges and to target fieldwork in order to test specimenbased range estimates and collect population data for SRLI plant species. Here, we outline a strategy for prioritizing fieldwork efforts in order to apply a wider range of IUCN Red List criteria to assessments of plant species, or any taxa with detailed locality or natural history specimen data, to produce a more robust estimation of the SRLI.

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Measuring Global Trends in the Status of Biodiversity: Red List Indices for Birds

Cited by 421 publications

References 20 publications

Future hotspots of terrestrial mammal loss

Future hotspots of terrestrial mammal loss

Reconsidering the Loss of Evolutionary History: How Does Non-random Extinction Prune the Tree-of-Life?

The Sampled Red List Index for Plants, phase II: ground-truthing specimen-based conservation assessments

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