A simple, sufficient, and consistent method to score the status of threats and demography of imperiled species
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Conservation Biology, Ecology, Science Policy
- Keywords
- Endangered Species Act, threats, demography, monitoring, conservation programs
- Copyright
- © 2016 Malcom et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. A simple, sufficient, and consistent method to score the status of threats and demography of imperiled species. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1860v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1860v1
Abstract
Managers of large wildlife conservation programs need information on the conservation status of each of many species to strategically allocate limited resources. Oversimplified status data, however, runs the risk of missing information essential to strategic allocation. Conservation status consists of two components, the status of threats a species faces and the species’ demographic status. Neither component alone is sufficient to characterize conservation status. Here we present a simple key for scoring threat and demographic changes for species using detailed information provided in free-form textual descriptions of conservation status. Importantly, this key applies equally to any taxon and can be used where quantitative trend data for threats or demography is sparse. We scored the threat and demographic status of 37 species recently recommended for reclassification under the Endangered Species Act by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and 15 control (not recommended for reclassification) species. We then compared the threat and demographic status scores to two metrics that FWS uses for their decision-making and reports to Congress: the reclassification recommendation and the recovery priority numbers (RPNs). While the metrics reported by FWS are often consistent with our scores for 52 species analyzed, our analyses highlight two problems with the oversimplified metrics. First, we show that both metrics can mask underlying demographic declines or threat increases; for example, ~40% of species not recommended for reclassification had changes in threats or demography. Second, we show that neither metric is consistent with either threats or demography alone, but conflates the two. We propose that large conservation programs, such as FWS’s Endangered Species program, adopt our simple scoring system for threats and demography. By doing so, program administrators will have better information to monitor program effectiveness and guide their decisions.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.