Red - an R package to facilitate species red list assessments according to the IUCN criteria.

Pedro Cardoso

doi:10.3897/bdj.5.e20530

Abstract

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List is the most useful database of species that are at risk of extinction worldwide, as it relies on a number of objective criteria and is now widely adopted. The R package red – IUCN Redlisting Tools - performs a number of spatial analyses based on either observed occurrences or estimated ranges. Functions include calculating Extent of Occurrence (EOO), Area of Occupancy (AOO), mapping species ranges, species distribution modelling using climate and land cover and calculating the Red List Index for groups of species. The package allows the calculation of confidence limits for all measures. Spatial data of species occurrences, environmental or land cover variables can be either given by the user or automatically extracted from several online databases. It outputs geographical range, elevation and country values, maps in several formats and vectorial data for visualization in Google Earth. Several examples are shown demonstrating the usefulness of the different methods. The red package constitutes an open platform for further development of new tools to facilitate red list assessments.

Highlights

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is the most widely used information source on species extinction risk (Rodrigues et al 2006, Mace et al 2008), relying on a number of objective criteria (IUCN 2001)
For the vast majority of species that lack appropriate data on population size and decline (Cardoso et al 2011a), the most used criteria by far are B and D2 (Cardoso et al 2011b, Lewis and Senior 2010), which are based on geographic range, namely the Extent of Occurrence (EOO), Area of Occupancy (AOO) and respective trends
The Red List Index (RLI) uses weighted scores based on the Red List status of each of the assessed species, giving us an indication of the overall trend of the group

Summary

Introduction

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is the most widely used information source on species extinction risk (Rodrigues et al 2006, Mace et al 2008), relying on a number of objective criteria (IUCN 2001). The RLI uses weighted scores based on the Red List status of each of the assessed species, giving us an indication of the overall trend of the group. Given the frequent shortcomings of available data, the package allows the calculation of confidence limits for EOO, AOO and the RLI.

Results

Conclusion