Dusty old specimen How do you go from a dusty old specimen to...

The biggest press story that Kew Gardens has ever had?

This is a very brief overview of the IUCN Sampled Red List Index for Plants project. The title was so long we decided to call it ‘Plants Under Pressure’.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM Our project has IUCN Red List in the title. Hopefully you already have heard about the Red List. It highlights species at high risk of extinction.

Critically Endangered Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii) The usual suspects. It highlights species level extinction risk and is a useful tool for conservation. However, it can be static, each assessment is a one-off. Imagine if we could extend this over time and see how extinction risk for an entire group is changing over time – getting better or worse...

IUCN Red List Index This is exactly what the IUCN Red List Index does. It combines overall extinction risk for a group and monitors how that changes over time. If the line goes down, it means, as a whole the groups is moving towards a greater risk of extinction i.e. things are getting worse. You’ll notice the conspicuous absence of plants....

Plants on the Red List SRLI random and representative sample all plants (approx. 380,000) The problem with plants. I’ll illustrate with this complex diagram. CLICK. This large circle represents all plants. CLICK. This grey circle represents all assessed plants (around 15,000 or about 5%) CLICK. The red circle represents ‘threatened’ plants – a biased sample because people assess what they expect to be threatened. SRLI overcomes this by picking a random sample CLICK. This give a representative view of plant threat status without having to assess all species – although that is the long term goal. Our sample included 7,000 species. assessed threatened

Red List assessment Over 1 million botanical records So we had our sample and needed to Red List these species. Here is where the dusty old specimen comes back in. We digitised and georeferenced these specimens so we could map them. We then did some geospatial analysis to give preliminary assessments Over 1 million botanical records Advanced mapping techniques (GeoCAT) Detailed analysis

geocat.kew.org During the project we developed GeoCAT which uses distribution information to calculate geospatial metrics used in Red List assessment.

SRLI scratchpad: www.threatenedplants.myspecies.info We wanted to communicate with the wider community about our assessments in order to get expert feedback so we set up a Scratchpad. Here is the first version of the scratchpad. We added a taxonomic list and posted up draft copies of our assessments as pdfs. CLICK. Here is the new improved version. Recent additions have proved really useful for us such as the link to our assessments on the Red List via the Red List API. CLICK. We hope users will comment on these so that we have feedback for the next assessment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=epysc1AWQu8

Scratchpad > GeoCAT - Demo

SRLI phase I – Results 1 in 5 Plants threatened! So, after assessing all those species we were able to make the first robust and representative view of threat level for plants. Our results suggested as much as 1 in 5 plants were threatened – hence the big news story.

Plants! Now we can add plants to the vertebrates and being monitoring plant threat status over time.

SRLI phase II – What next? Targeted fieldwork and monitoring. A global network. Phase I provided a snapshot of the current status of plant diversity. Our 7,000 SRLI species need to be regularly re-assessed to understand the changing status of the world’s plants, and indeed global biodiversity overall For Phase II: Targeted fieldwork will be essential. Kew will mobilise a global network to establish an international, broad-based monitoring scheme. Monitor future trends in the status of global plant diversity

The IUCN Sampled Red List Index for Plants Plants Under Pressure The IUCN Sampled Red List Index for Plants www.kew.org/plants-at-risk‎ threatenedplants.myspecies.info/ geocat.kew.org Here are some useful links. Contact Janine Griffiths j.griffiths@kew.org @KewSRLI

These organisation were all involved.... thanks