Towards a new global database of regional red lists (RegRed): metadata

Conservation biology depends on an assessment of threats to species. This has been done at the global scale through the IUCN red list, and also locally and regionally, e.g. through country-specific regional red lists. The latter quantify the level of threat to a species in a region, irrespectively to its global status (e.g., a species can be non-threatened globally, but threatened or extirpated in a specific region). There are efforts to collate these regional red lists (e.g., the NRL database hosted by ZSL in collaboration with the IUCN National Red List Working Group), but these have gaps, and are in the process of redevelopment with increased input from country focal points.

Here, we announce a renewal of the effort to collate regional red lists. To create it we searched and compiled sources containing species threat assessments all over the world. As a result, we found 2,093 sources in 172 countries, covering 487 broad taxonomic groups. In this paper, we provide the compiled metadata, enriched with geographical and taxonomic information, and details about the source’s title, URL, file format, language, and publication date. This is step one in our effort, in which we ultimately plan to digitise all the compiled sources and provide them openly. By announcing this effort here, we aim to actively seek to expand the metadata database and to collate the respective data. Please refer to the section “How to engage?” if you are interested in collaborating with us.