The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: Motivations, Challenges, and Applications

Abstract

In response to growing demand for ecosystem-level risk assessment in biodiversity conservation, and rapid proliferation of locally tailored protocols, the IUCN recently endorsed new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment. Four qualities were sought in the design of the IUCN criteria: generality; precision; realism; and simplicity. Drawing from extensive global consultation, we explore trade-offs among these qualities when dealing with key challenges, including ecosystem classification, measuring ecosystem dynamics, degradation and collapse, and setting decision thresholds to delimit ordinal categories of threat. Experience from countries with national lists of threatened ecosystems demonstrates well-balanced trade-offs in current and potential applications of Red Lists of Ecosystems in legislation, policy, environmental management and education. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems should be judged by whether it achieves conservation ends and improves natural resource management, whether its limitations are outweighed by its benefits, and whether it performs better than alternative methods. Future development of the Red List of Ecosystems will benefit from the history of the Red List of Threatened Species which was trialed and adjusted iteratively over 50 years from rudimentary beginnings. We anticipate the Red List of Ecosystems will promote policy focus on conservation outcomes in situ across whole landscapes and seascapes.

Habitats on the grid: The spatial dimension does matter for red-listing

“…CITES, 1973;European Commission, 2011;United Nations, 1976, 1992. The most challenging aspect stems from the complexity of biodiversity, that in itself comprises both multiple levels of organisation Despite the cutting edge importance of species Red Lists, the realisation that an approach focused exclusively on the species level is unfit to conserve all components of biodiversity led the scientific community, conservation professionals and institutions to be increasingly concerned with biodiversity assessments, addressing higher levels of biological organisation (Izco, 2015;Keith, 2009;Keith et al, 2013Keith et al, , 2015Kontula & Raunio, 2009;IUCN, 2015a;Nicholson, Keith, & Wilcove, 2009;Rodríguez et al, 2011Rodríguez et al, , 2012Rodríguez et al, , 2015. Ecological communities may more efficiently represent the biological diversity as a whole, compared to the species-level approach, which often lacks direct information about fundamental abiotic components, thus missing both the targets of protecting ecological patterns and processes, and ensuring the persistence of ecosystem functions and structure (Balmford et al, 2002;Cowling et al, 2004;Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005;Noss, 1996; Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2010).…”

The Structuring Role of Marine Life in Open Ocean Habitat: Importance to International Policy

“…Globally, efforts to align habitats and species conservation have increased in recent years. For example, 66 Ecologically and Biologically Significant Areas have been defined under the CBD that cover places in ABNJ (Bax et al, 2016) and the IUCN is developing a Red List for Ecosystems which includes marine habitats (Keith et al, 2015). Other efforts are pioneering approaches to identify important areas based on species distributions (e.g., Key Biodiversity Areas, Edgar et al, 2008;Important Marine Mammal Areas, Corrigan et al, 2014).…”

Guidelines for the application of IUCN Red List of ecosystems categories and criteria

“…The primary goal of the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) is to support conservation in resource use and management decisions by identifying ecosystems most at risk of biodiversity loss (Keith et al, 2013;Keith et al, 2015). By assessing relative risks of biodiversity loss at the ecosystem level, the RLE accounts for broad scale ecological processes and important dependencies and interactions among species .…”

“…Ecoregions and biomes are areas that share common macro-environmental or biogeographical features and contain complexes of contrasting, but co-occurring ecosystem types (Spalding et al, 2007). The potential heterogeneity of ecoregions and biomes makes them unsuitable for most RLE applications Keith et al, 2015;Keith et al, 2013). Other terms applied in conservation assessments -such as ecological communities, habitats, biotopes, and (largely in the terrestrial context) vegetation types -are regarded as operational synonyms of ecosystem type (Nicholson et al, 2009) providing they are adequately defined in accordance with the procedures described in the assessment process (Section 4.2).…”