RED LISTING OF ORCHIDS

For those of you who were not at the Orchid Specialist Group meeting at the 3rd International Orchid Conservation Congress in Costa Rica, as the Red List focal point for the OSG, I put out an appeal to the membership for more active Red Listing. Love it or hate it, Red Listing is one of the few ways that politicians will take notice of orchids.  At the moment, there are only 150 species of orchids Red Listed, and the OSG membership needs to become proactive in this area.  Many of you will know species that you could red list in 10 minutes, certainly I can think of half a dozen off the top of my head that I could do!  Below is information about where you can find the criteria, category and standard documents.

To conduct a Red List assessment you can find all the information you need at http://www.iucnredlist.org/.  Under The IUCN SSC Red List Programme (at http://www.iucnredlist.org/info/programme) it gives you an overview of the programme and under Assessment Process there is a step-by-step guide (at http://www.iucnredlist.org/info/assessment_process) to the assessment process including the standard document to fill in and the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria.

Currently GIS (Geographical Information Systems) assessments on there own are not sufficient, they have to be backed up with information about threats in that region and evidence of decline or extreme fluctuations of population size, EOO (Extent of Occurrence), AOO (Area of Occupancy), or extent or quality of habitat (which we usually get from satellite imagery).  The forthcoming April meeting of the Plants subcommittee of IUCN will again debate implementing a preliminary rating category to help IUCN to meet Target 2 of the GSPC (Global Strategy for Plant Conservation), which otherwise has no chance of being met.

Although just using the GIS approach will not result in them being entered on the Red List, all those that come out of the procedure as being threatened will be flagged for further work to essentially ground-truth these and to get a final assessment that will go on to the Red List.  So none of your efforts will be wasted.  But it will be essential that the GIS data used for the assessment is submitted. Regarding this last point please be reassured that this information would be kept confidential for the sensitive species.

The question now is which species should we examine first, since we have 25,000+ to choose from.  One suggestion is species from the current Sample Red List Index project which contains around 570 species (see below).  The target is to get these completed by the end of 2007. 

For further information regarding this project contact Dr Neil Brummitt at

Happy Red Listing

Dave

15-18 March 2007