Sir

Red Data Books and Red Lists of threatened species have drawn attention to species at risk of extinction worldwide1,2. As the number of national Red Lists increases, more information becomes available to assess the global status of species. Unfortunately, global assessments coordinated by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) are not making full use of this wealth of local data, often giving a misleading picture of the status of a taxon.

In our study of this problem, we excluded widely distributed threatened species, whose risk of extinction may vary from country to country, and focused on nationally endemic taxa, where national and global Red Lists should be identical. We found that national assessments tend to incorporate data from global assessments, but the reverse is much less frequent. This decreases the efficiency of conservation at the national level, where actions are most likely to have an impact; local organizations have difficulty raising international funds because donors believe, wrongly, that international lists are more accurate.

We compared global and national lists of threatened endemic species for Argentina3, Bolivia4, Ecuador5 and Venezuela6. Although most South American countries have national Red Lists7, only these four use the new IUCN Red List categories used for global assessments8. The combined national and global lists cover 173 taxa (Table 1). All taxa should be included in both lists; in fact, only a quarter are. Over half of the taxa listed nationally are not listed globally, while more than three-quarters of the taxa included in the global lists also feature in national lists. Of those taxa included in both lists, the categories they are assigned to in each list are more likely to differ than not (χ2=4.22, d.f.=1, P=0.05). Agreement between national and global lists is best for birds, followed by mammals and reptiles (Table 1).

Table 1 Nationally endemic South American animals in national and global Red Lists
Full size table

We suggest that these disparities are due to a lack of communication between national assessments based on geography and global assessments based on taxonomy. National Red Lists are usually produced by local organizations. In contrast, IUCN compiles global Red Lists through its Species Survival Commission (SSC), a network of more than 5,000 volunteer scientists organized into areas of taxonomic interest.

To improve the flow of information between national and global Red Lists, data from geographically based lists must be compiled, cross-referenced, and made available to global assessors. To this end, the SSC should create an interdisciplinary group to administer a website containing the national Red Lists of the world. By standardizing the process of submitting information to the website, a ‘virtual’ specialist group would be both cost-effective and relatively easy to manage; it would significantly improve the quality of Red Lists at both levels and would make research and conservation more effective.