The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) is the oldest and largest global environmental organisation in the world, with something around 11,000 volunteer experts in 160 countries. 45 offices, NGO and private sectors around the planet support their work. Everyone should know such an important work, sadly this last part does not happen.
The IUCN was founded in 1948. Its objective is to conserve biodiversity, showing how it can drive to a better understanding of how to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, such as food security, climate change and sustainable development. For anyone who wants to take a look and get the IUCN known, I leave the link here: http://www.iucn.org/
The focus of this post is an IUCN’s iniciative that intended to highlight species threatened with extinction, and to promote their conservation, through their red list. The IUCN red list have been made for the past 50 years. In this list, which is more like a book, the species are categorized by their extinction risk. The categories go from the least concern to extinct, passing by vulnerable, critical endangered and other few categories. It also includes the specie’s distribution, population, habitat, threats, conservation actions, ecology and taxonomic status. Proving that it is a really useful tool for scientists, students and anyone who is interested on biology, biodiversity and conservation.
A useful thing about the IUCN red list is that you do not need the released book to access the information. You can just go to IUCN red list webpage, clicking on this link: http://www.iucnredlist.org/
If you go to the search tool, you can seek for any known species of plant, fungi and animal on Earth. For example, if I look for Pontoporia blainvillei, I will find that this is a small specie of dolphin, known as Franciscana or La Plata dolphin, which is endemic of South America. They can be found in estuaries and close to the shore and they are a vulnerable specie, mainly due incidental catches by fishnets. I literally spent 3 minutes to find all this information on the website above.
For new scientists or normal people intending to learn more about the nature and conservation: use the IUCN as one of your main sources, their information is highly reliable, accurate and updated.
Ocean Science 