WCS 3-Sentence Science

Greenlighting the Green List

November 22, 2019

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present work by WCS’s Elizabeth Bennett on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s proposed “Green List” of recovering species.

1. The proposal of a ‘Green List of Species’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) measures recovery against historical baselines; in particular, the method requires estimates of species range and abundance in previous centuries.
2. Researchers present the case for why setting species recovery against a historical baseline is necessary to produce ambitious conservation targets, and they highlight examples from palaeoecology and historical ecology where fossil and archival data have been used to establish historical species baselines.
3. The researchers introduce a Conservation Archive, a database of resources that can be used to infer baseline species conditions, and invite contributions to this database.

Study and Journal: “Using historical and palaeoecological data to inform ambitious species recovery targets” from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
WCS Co-Author(s): Elizabeth Bennett, Vice President, Species Conservation

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.