One of the greatest barriers to saving the world’s biodiversity is simply a lack of knowledge: to date less than 50,000 species have been surveyed by the IUCN Red List regarding their threat level, while the vast majority of the world’s species are left unanalyzed especially fungi, plants, fish, reptiles, and insects and other invertebrates. To address this problem, some of the world’s top biologists have proposed a 60-million US dollar program they dub the ‘barometer of biodiversity’ to gather a representative sample of all taxons.
“Our knowledge about species and extinction rates remains very poor, and this has negative consequences for our environment and economy,” Simon Stuart, Chair of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission, said in a press release. “By expanding the current IUCN Red List of Threatened Species to include up to approximately 160,000 well-chosen species, we will have a good barometer for informing decisions globally.”
“The more we learn about indicator species, the more we know about the status of the living environment that sustains us all,” adds Edward O. Wilson, a world-renowned biologist and writer at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. “Threatened species, in particular, need to be targeted to enable better conservation and policy decisions.”
 The Anisocelis flavolineata, is an orange, black, yellow, and red flag footed bug. Like the vast majority of insects, it has not been evaluated by the IUCN Red List. To date only 7,615 invertebrates have been evaluated by the IUCN Red List out of 1,359,365 described species: 0.5 percent of the total. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. |
Tripling the current number of species analyzed by the IUCN Red List would provide researchers with a “solid basis for informing decisions globally,” the authors write in the journal Science, “for example, on conservation planning, resource allocation, environmental impact assessments, monitoring biodiversity trends, and enabling countries to develop national-level biodiversity indicators,”
They estimate the entire expansion of the IUCN Red List would cost 60 million US dollars. Currently, much of the work done for the IUCN Red List is performed by volunteers. They propose analyzing an additional 35,000 vertebrates, 38,000 invertebrates, 25,000 plants, and 14,500 fungi and other species.
“The Red List is biased toward higher vertebrates. The vast majority of species—including most plants, invertebrates, and lower vertebrates, and almost all fungi—are still grossly underrepresented. A more finely tuned barometer is within reach by expanding the taxonomic base of the Red List to make it much more representative of the diversity of life,” the authors write. To date only 18 species of fungi have been analyzed by the IUCN Red List.
 This captive Sumatran Rhino is classified as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List: less than 250 individuals survive. The IUCN Red List has evaluated most mammals, birds, and amphibians. Photo by: Jeremy Hance. |
“We urgently need to ramp up current efforts to catalogue a far more representative selection of our vast biodiversity, while we still can, and we should focus first and foremost on those areas of highest extinction risk,” says Russell Mittermeier, President of Conservation International and Chair of IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group. “Such information will also help governments and communities to design appropriate responses to climate change and to other pressing conservation challenges.”
After centuries of taxonomic work, scientists have described 1.9 million species. However, this number is far below current estimates of the number of species living on Earth: researchers say it is likely that 10 to 20 million species inhabit the planet. If bacteria are added into this estimate, its likely it jumps another 10 million species or so.
“Knowledge about species and extinction rates remains very poor, and species disappear before we know they existed. […] It is time to accelerate taxonomy and scientific natural history, two of the most vital but neglected disciplines of biology,” the authors write.
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