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The World Conservation Monitoring Centre provides information services on conservation and sustainable use of the world's living resources, and helps others to develop information systems of their own.
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Sources of conservation status data
Data are presented in this list for both local (national and sub-national) and global status. Data on national conservation status have been provided by a wide range of organisations and individuals throughout the world, with data sets relating to either a geographical area or a taxonomic group. Major sources have been national Red Data books or lists that have been produced by countries throughout the world. Data have also been provided by SSC Specialist Groups. In addition, a great deal of information has been supplied by individual botanists and conservationists. Often these workers have provided updated information or completely new information about taxa of conservation concern, and we hope to bring them into the SSC network.
A major portion of the list comes from electronic data sets from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Wildlife Australia, National Botanical Institute (NBI), and Flora Europaea. This list therefore represents a mixture of various 'official' status reports as well as individual opinion; by referring to the data source it is possible to determine the source of virtually all data in this list.
WCMC's role is essentially one of compiling the outputs of these distributed data sets, and assigning global threat categories based on the collective local threat status information. WCMC makes no value judgement during the process, other than validating, as far as possible, the source of the supplied national threat status data.
Interpreting threat status
In many cases, national/sub-national threat status is given in published national Red Data books or lists, with threat status given according to IUCN categories. Where different schemes have been followed, every effort has been made by WCMC to assign the appropriate IUCN threat category based on the definitions given by the data providers. Where electronic data sets are concerned, detailed discussions have been held prior to the data being merged into the global database. Although the constraints of space in this volume prevent the display of these "non-IUCN" threat categories, they are maintained in the database.
Interpreting and assigning the global threat status
The global threat status recorded for each taxon in the Threatened Plants database is assigned at WCMC on the basis of the combined national/subnational data. For a taxon to be listed as globally threatened, information is needed on the local threat status throughout its natural range. Global threat status is assigned only once the full distribution for the taxon in question is known. A "lowest common denominator" approach is followed meaning, for example, that a species listed as Rare within part of its range but Endangered throughout the rest of its range, will be listed as Rare globally. A species listed as Endangered globally will be either Endangered or Extinct throughout its range, and so on.
Exceptions to assigning the global threat status
In some instances data provided to WCMC have given global rather than, or in addition to, national/subnational threat status. This is particularly true for large data sets that have been provided electronically, notably from The Nature Conservancy (data sources 20850 and 20883) and Wildlife Australia (data source 20681). If global but not local threat status has been provided, a local rank of Indeterminate has been assigned by WCMC.
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further information contact: Information Office, WCMC, 219 Huntingdon Road, Cambridge CB3 0DL, UK Information enquiries Tel: +44 (0)1223 277722 Main switchboard Tel: +44 (0)1223 277314 Fax: +44 (0)1223 277136 Email: info@wcmc.org.uk Document URL: http:// www.wcmc.org.uk /species/plants/status.htm Revision date: 4-February-2000 | Current date: 4-July-2000 |
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