Heck, that was good timing. In the in press issue of Conservation Biology, Georgina Mace and colleagues give a great overview of the IUCN Red List — its origins, history, and current status; its methods and pitfalls (especially good discussion of the issues concerning “Data Deficient” species). The more I think about it, the less I value efforts to use the Red List to assess ecological traits that might pre-condition species for endangerment: many of those traits are highly correlated with the conditions for being Red Listed (e.g. habitat specificity and Criterion B: Small Range Area and Decline). The Red List isn’t a list of species that will go extinct; it’s a list of species that very smart and concerned scientists believe might go extinct based on a number of factors that they believe would pre-condition a species for extinction. So any study using the Red List is inevitably analyzing what those traits are, as defined by the Red List.

And since I mentioned genetic uniqueness in that post about the Red List, here’s a paper by Daniel Faith from the very same issue of Cons Bio discussing the EDGE of existence program: an effort to combine extinction probability with phylogenetic risk. Heavenly.

Mace, G. et al. Quantification of Extinction Risk: IUCN’s System for Classifying Threatened Species. Conservation Biology, in press. (doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01044.x)

Faith, D. Threatened Species and the Potential Loss of Phylogenetic Diversity: Conservation Scenarios Based on Estimated Extinction Probabilities and Phylogenetic Risk Analysis. Conservation Biology, in press. (doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01068.x)