Online assessment guide
IUCN amphibian assessment online discussion forum
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Welcome to the IUCN amphibian assessment online discussion forum!
This website was created as a tool to address the global conservation assessment or reassessment of amphibian species using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria. It is meant to complement the various other ways of conducting assessments and other resources such as the IUCN SSC Amphibian Red List Authority (Amphibian RLA) wiki site. This online discussion forum is managed by the Amphibian RLA with the auspices of the Amphibian Specialist Group (ASG).
There are several ways by which conservation assessments can be developed, which include 1) assessment workshops, 2) one-on-one consultation with experts, usually through some electronic medium such as email or Skype, and 3) online discussion forums. The first two have been the standard approaches used thus far where amphibian assessments are concerned, but the latter approach has been successfully implemented by BirdLife International to assess globally threatened bird species for a number of years now. Given changing priorities and resource availability among funding organizations and conservation partners, and the significant volume of new information that is being regularly generated on amphibian distributions, population status, threats, natural history and taxonomy, the logical next step for amphibian assessments is an expansion of the assessment toolkit to include online discussion forums, in this way continuing to conduct assessments and informing conservation action.
Objective of forum
The main goal of this forum is to provide a medium whereby experts and interested parties can contribute information and provide input towards the global conservation assessment of amphibian species. Assessment-relevant information includes details on a species’ distribution, population status and/or trends, natural history, threats and conservation actions. Forum users can both contribute to an existing proposed assessment and/or they can propose that a species be reassessed based on new information that could potentially change a species’ status.
The forum is designed primarily to address the large number of reassessments that need to be undertaken from here until 2014 and beyond, ten years after the 2004 Global Amphibian Assessment, and by which time assessments will expire if not reassessed; where new, recently described species are concerned, assessments are more likely to be undertaken on a one-on-one basis with describing authors.
Priority will be given to 2004 or older assessments.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Given the current quality control requirements needed for conservation assessments to be published on the IUCN Red List, and our very limited human resources, we are unable to process large numbers of assessments at this time. Country-level global reassessments may be possible if requests come with the funding and resources necessary to conduct such reassessments, or if the herpetological community of the country or region in question is willing to take over stewardship of its global assessments.
How the forum works
Assessments are organized hierarchically by categories and topics such as region, taxonomic group, etc. They may also be organized by country in the future. Each major category will group a set of topics, which in turn will group entries relating to individual species, so, for example, a hypothetical category of either “Neotropics” or “Bufonids” could have a topic on “Atelopus”, which may contain entries for Atelopus andinus, Atelopus balios, Atelopus boulengeri, and so on. In cases where species are being reassessed primarily through the online discussion forum, each entry will contain the new proposed category and criteria, primary supporting documentation, including any recent information relevant to the assessment, and questions that may help inform the assessment process. In cases where species have already been reassessed in the context of an assessment workshop, the new proposed assessments and primary supporting documentation will be made available under each entry so that experts will have an opportunity to revise these assessments before they are sent off for review. If there are any outstanding questions these will be included at the end of each proposed assessment.
Each posted entry will be open to feedback for a period of up to three months, with the initial date set by the posting date, or if this date is prior to the forum launch, then the forum launch date will take precedence. Posted workshop reassessments with relatively small to medium numbers of assessments will be open to feedback for a period of two months from the date of posting. Experts who contribute with novel and relevant information will be acknowledged as contributors in the respective assessment.
For a more complete overview on rules and how to use this forum, please go to our how to use this forum page.
Please note that due to a glitch in the system, contributors names are not displayed in alphabetical order, as they would be once published in the Red List Assessment.
