• Remember how David Hayes might’ve once could’ve been Interior Secretary? He’s going to be Deputy Interior Secretary instead.
• Native plants in your backyard really do increase native diversity of wildlife.
• $93 million has been spent conserving the Mojave desert tortoise. Meanwhile, the Barneby reed-mustard (of the Utah Reed-Mustards) received $6. I know we’ve put a value on a human life. Has anybody estimated the value of a species? Whatever it was, it was too high for the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, which is now genetically extinct.
• It’s fun pretending to read this interview with David Attenborough in his voice. To wit: “I can find you a new species without any problem at all. Take you to the rainforest and spend three or four days just scooping up insects. The difficulty is not finding the species, it’s finding the one man who specialises in thrips or whatever, who can tell you that it’s a different thing. Taxonomy is unfashionable.”
• “Mythical glorification of trees first reached its zenith in the songs, prose and paintings of the Romantic period. The Nazis were likewise obsessed with the concept of the forest.” Uh, Brian? Little help?
• Foreigners appear to be driving demand for snow leopard pelts in Afghanistan.
• From Minnesota Birdnerd, here is a picture of a real live bilateral gynandromorph cardinal: half-male, half-female, down the center:

• The Alpine chough is a Portuguese bird dependent on agricultural systems for its insectivorous diet. A new initiative in Serra de Aire e Candeeiros Natural Park will allow limited grazing and agricultural activities to help out this threatened bird.
• Little piece on how and when scientists finally move a species from “Critically Endangered/ Possibly Extinct” to Gone for Good.
• Martinez, CA (home of John Muir), has a beaver problem. Or an unnecessary construction project problem. Or something.

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)

• The Kirtland’s Warbler may be permanently endangered, says the AP. In the same article, they admit that their population has increased ten-fold in the past 20 years. Headlines!
• CI describes the World Conservation Congress, the “Olympics of Conservation,” says Russ Mittermeier.
• Speaking of Urban Ecology, Nick Paumgarten, in his typically shambolic prose, describes the work of Marko Pecarevic. Pecarevic, a grad student with James Danoff-Burg, studied ant population dynamics in the medians of Manhattan. Previous New Yorker coverage of Manhattan’s wildlife: Beaver, Coyote