A database of endangered creatures fails to list those most at risk

ONE of the problems facing nature conservationists is that they often have little idea what is being lost. The places where flora and fauna flourish are frequently remote, inaccessible or both. It is one thing to know that the Amazonian rainforest or the seas off the Sahara desert are threatened. It is quite another to know which species in those ecosystems will be lost if they are badly damaged. The recent launch of a database containing details of creatures threatened with extinction is supposed to change that, but the task looks daunting.

When nature conservation first became a popular cause, in the early 1960s, one of its champions was Peter Scott, a British naturalist, artist and Olympic yachtsman, and son of the ill-fated polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. He decided to draft lists of endangered species, known as the Red Data books, for a body called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Letters were sent from the union’s base in Morges, Switzerland, to naturalists, asking them to to assess the status of different species of animal and to grade them into one of five categories: very rare and getting rarer; less rare but threatened; stable; unknown; and formerly rare but now no longer in danger. …