Crayfish, the EOL, and the IUCN Red List: Together at Last?
Kannan MahadevanIf the ultimate aim of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is to provide an online home for all species knowledge, the goal of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List should be understood as broadly similar: its intent is also aggregation, but with a narrower organizing principle—evaluating species’ conservation status. So it is fitting that the EOL’s Biodiversity Synthesis Group (BioSynC) hosted a synthesis meeting from June 8-12, designed to produce conservation assessments of North American crayfish species that will eventually find their way onto the IUCN Red List and EOL species pages.
Crayfish, along with other freshwater species, are one of the groups subject to a dearth of conservation information on the IUCN Red List. As such, their assessment is central to the Red List’s efforts to expand its taxonomic coverage in preparation for the IUCN’s 2010 goal of reducing global biodiversity loss. Because a full assessment of all underrepresented species is simply not feasible, the meeting used the Sample Red List Index (SLRI) approach, which in the words of the IUCN website, aims to improve the Red List’s biodiversity coverage by sampling “species from selected taxonomic groups to provide trends in extinction risk that are more representative of global biodiversity.
The meeting featured twelve scientists from the U.S., Mexico, and the U.K.—all experts on North American crayfish—gathered in the Field Museum’s Biodiversity Synthesis Center for introductory talks and smaller working groups split up according to regional expertise or crayfish taxonomy. According to Nadia Dewhurst (meeting facilitator and research scientist at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London) assembling a team of experts is the “most effective way to get large numbers of assessments done” quickly, “producing data you would not see otherwise” because it is more interactive than doing assessments as an individual or remotely via the internet.
Ben Collen (Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London and meeting facilitator) explained that, while part of the point of the meeting was to pull together species data or literature that was not previously in the public domain, far more important was the experts’ interpretation of that data. Being extremely familiar with a certain region or ecosystem, they could assess the scale at which a certain environmental threat operates much more accurately than a scientist foreign to that region. In the case of crayfish, providing even a statewide context is a large-scale effort that requires coordination of a lot of data on extremely localized populations.
The fruits of their labor are concrete: 398 conservation assessments that didn’t exist previously, as well as all the aggregated content that contributed to making the assessments. They are hopeful the crayfish assessments will broaden the rather restricted set of species data that currently informs global conservation strategies, especially considering that the threats they have evaluated for North American crayfish may apply broadly across freshwater ecosystems. At the least, they will have created an up-to-date report on North American crayfish conservation status, a snapshot, which, when held up against a later report, can be used to infer trends in biodiversity change over time. Furthermore, once these assessments go on the Red List, data-deficient species will be highlighted in the public domain and research reprioritized accordingly.
Though partnership agreements between the IUCN Red List and the EOL are still in tentative stages, Collen admits that it “would be interesting to find EOL information that can inform IUCN species assessments.” Indeed, glancing at the species pages of either site reveals several information fields common to both. The intersection of two complementary, scientifically-vetted, customizable repositories of biodiversity content is nothing if not an exciting prospect.
