 |
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.
|
Data for approximately 5,000 taxa of Australian native plants (of a total national vascular flora of c. 18,000- 20,000) was compiled for a revision of Rare or Threatened Australian Plants - ROTAP (Briggs & Leigh, 1996, data source 20681). The list included a number of undescribed taxa for which it was possible to assign a conservation ranking, but these have been omitted from this publication. However, their inclusion in ROTAP as a conservation tool for Australia is essential as many of these may be under imminent threat and deserve as much attention as do described taxa.
The national list of Australian plants at risk was first compiled in 1981 for the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service. Revisions of that list were published in 1988 and 1996. Rare or Threatened Australian Plants (ROTAP) had no legal status, but the early editions were the only nationally recognised threatened plants list at that time. In 1993 the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council (ANZECC) issued a list, based on ROTAP, that was endorsed by all of Australia's state and territory conservation agencies. In 1992 the Commonwealth of Australia proclaimed the Endangered Species Protection Act and a schedule to the Act included a version of ROTAP and the ANZECC plants list.
In 1996 responsibility for maintenance of the national list of threatened plants was taken by the Threatened Species and Communities Section of Wildlife Australia, within the federal environment department. Details of threatened Australian plants will be compiled as the National Threatened Flora Database and will be endorsed by ANZECC agencies. Whilst this list will have no legal status it will be used as a basis for entries to the schedules of the Endangered Species Protection Act.
ROTAP uses a binary coding system developed and refined over several years but based on the IUCN categories used in this List. While the ROTAP codes X, E, V, R, and K use definitions close to those of the IUCN categories , the ROTAP system uses other indicators to supply additional information to users of the list. For example, the ROTAP code for Dawinia collina is 2VCit. This indicates that this plant is Vulnerable (V), that its geographic range is less than 100 km (2), that there is at least one population reserved in a national park or other protected area (C), that fewer than 1000 plants are known to occur within the reserve (i) and that the total known population is conserved (t). A full discussion of these terms may be found in Briggs & Leigh, 1996. In this Red List only the 'top level' codes for Australian taxa are used.
It should be noted that each of Australia's states and territories compile lists of threatened taxa based on state boundaries. These state lists are used in the compilation of the national ROTAP list. Thus, a plant that grows in more than one state may be classed as Endangered in one state and Vulnerable in another state, but on a national assessment the plant may be rated Vulnerable. Within the Australian context the state and national lists are complementary.
| For
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_wa.htm Revision date: 4-February-2000 | Current date: 4-July-2000 |
||||
Home |
 Comments |
© WCMC | ||
