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

By David A. Keith, J. Rodríguez, T. Brooks, Mark A. Burgman, E. Barrow, Lucie Bland, P. Comer, Janet Franklin, J. Link, M. McCarthy and 9 more. 2015

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3a80605c4048ad24cee9c137f8aaf901bce75e4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Changing trends and persisting biases in three decades of conservation science (2017, methodology): “For example, the recent development of an IUCN Key Biodiversity Areas standard has in part considered the genetic diversity element (Brooks et al., 2015), and an IUCN Red List of Ecosystems is currently being developed (Keith et al., 2015).”
Guidelines for the application of IUCN Red List of Ecosystems categories and criteria (2015, methodology): “The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems was developed to promote a consistent global framework for monitoring the status of ecosystems (Keith et al., 2015).”
A methodological protocol for Annex i Habitats monitoring: The contribution of vegetation science (2016, background): “Additionally, in the last two decades, it became increasingly evident that biodiversity can be more effectively represented and monitored by a community-approach than by analysing single species (Noss, 1996; Cowling et al., 2004; Nicholson et al., 2009; Galdenzi et al., 2012; Rodríguez et al., 2012;”