The IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria have undergone an extensive review in recent years. This review has produced a clearer, more open, and easy-to-use system. The revised Categories and Criteria (IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria version 3.1) were adopted by IUCN Council in February 2000 and all new assessments and reassessments of taxa on the IUCN Red List must follow this revised system.
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In order to ensure global uniformity when describing the habitat in which a taxon occurs, the threats to a taxon, what conservation measures are in place or are needed, and whether or not the taxon is utilized, a set of standard terms (Classification Schemes; formerly referred to as Authority Files) have been developed for documenting taxa on the IUCN Red List.
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The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is available only as an electronic version on the World Wide Web. A CD-ROM version of the Red List was produced in 2000 and funds permitting, a new version will be produced in the future. The information presented is based on data extracted from the Species Information Service (SIS) database maintained by the Red List Unit of the IUCN Species Programme. The information provided here covers all taxa that have been assigned an IUCN Red List Category with the exception of those designated as Not Evaluated (NE).
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The text on many of the static pages on this Red List web site includes citations of various references. This is particularly so on the Data Organization, Sources & Quality pages and Table 1 of the Summary Statistics. The full details of these references are provided here.
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The information about each taxon listed on the IUCN Red List often represents an accumulation of knowledge derived from previously published Red Lists, including the 1996 IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals and The World List of Threatened Trees which were the last Red Lists to be published as hardcopy books. Users are therefore referred to these previous publications when checking on information sources and data quality.
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Tables of summary statistics generated from the threatened species database are made available here.
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The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ is essentially a checklist of taxa that have undergone an extinction risk assessment using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria. The majority of assessments appearing on the IUCN Red List are carried out by members of the IUCN SSC Specialist Groups appointed Red List Authorities, or by participants of Global Biodiversity Assessment workshops. However, assessments can be done by anyone and submitted to IUCN for consideration. The process for completing an assessment to getting it published on the IUCN Red List is outlined here.
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