This paper highlights a major research–implementation gap in the application of the wide variety of assessment methods, which could be bridged by providing users with easy access to the most relevant tools, hands-on training, and strengthening communication.
Among North American wildflowers, few are as beloved and culturally relevant as Trilliums. A new report led by the ABQ BioPark, NatureServe, and Mt. Cuba Center, analyzed risk factors to these plants and found that 32% of all North American Trillium species or varieties are threatened with extinction.
In this analysis, a new framework for assessing climate change vulnerability was applied to a cross-section of 33 upland ecosystem types in the United States. All 33 types were listed as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered, demonstrating the use of this input to the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems.
By building habitat suitability models for a taxonomically diverse group of 2216 imperiled plants and animals, we revealed comprehensive and detailed protection opportunities in the conterminous United States. The results provide fine-scale, taxonomically diverse inputs for local and regional priority-setting and show that although protection efforts are still widely needed on private lands, notable gains can be achieved by increasing protection status on selected federal lands.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) is an emerging global standard for ecosystem risk assessment that integrates data and knowledge to document the relative risk status of ecosystem types. This analysis documents the status of all terrestrial ecosystems across temperate and tropical North America and the Caribbean.
Key Biodiversity Areas highlights the critical role KBAs can play in shaping conservation strategies, including by guiding the expansion of protected areas, aligning with global biodiversity targets, informing safeguard policies and environmental risk assessments, and ultimately avoiding species extinction. NatureServe's own Dr. Healy Hamilton is a contributing author to the Introductory chapter.
NatureServe, together with colleagues on the IUCN SSC Post-2020 Task Force and the Red List Committee contributed to the launch of the STAR (Species Threat Abatement & Restoration) metric. STAR offers, for the first time, a robust and spatially explicit indicator to track actions aimed at reducing threats to species. This fills a big hole in the global indicator library, allowing countries (and even corporations or investment banks) to quantify their efforts to improve conditions for the persistence of biodiversity. It also represents yet another conservation knowledge product based on the Red List.
NatureServe and Network staff collaborated with Australian ecologists to apply NatureServe’s International Vegetation Classification (IVC) to Australian woodlands and grasslands, providing a comprehensive approach for describing and classifying ecosystems at multiple scales.
This paper presents an automated process to use data from iNaturalist, a popular citizen science platform, and a United States national list of nonnative plant species to compile a provisional watch list of the 100 most frequently reported nonnative species within a 160 km buffer around a managed area. It demonstrates the application of the process using 36 US National Park Service units with relatively small operating budgets.