This study reveals that only about 5% of ecosystems within the Tropical Andes biodiversity hotspot are adequately represented in designated protected areas. However, the number of ecosystem types adequately protected could increase to 31% if governments and civil society act to protect Key Biodiversity Areas – places that meet the internationally recognized standard for sites that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity.
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.
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.
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. Dr. Healy Hamilton, former NatureServe Chief Scientist, 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.
While most biodiversity data is collected by scientists on the ground, engineers continue to develop remote sensing products that allow us to detect large-scale changes on Earth from space. In a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, Miguel Fernandez joined a team of scientists from agencies and institutes such as NASA and the UN Environment Program in evaluating how to maximize the potential for monitoring biodiversity by including data collected by satellites.