Conservation Status Data on iNat

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(I apologise in advance for this post feeling a bit like an advertisement, and I hope to not break any forum rules with this, but it is kinda important to me…)

I noticed that conservation status data is quite lacking on iNat at the moment because for most species it just hasn’t been added yet (at least in Germany). Personally, I think this is a shame, as I think it is quite important information for species conservation.

So, I’m currently working through the red lists by the Rote-Liste-Zentrum to add them where they are missing for Germany. However, I seem to have vastly underestimated the scale of this project and am probably unable to do everything by myself.
If any iNat curators are interested in helping and want to do the same for their country/area or help me with the German lists, that would be great. :D

If you are not a curator and want to help, I have thought about making a bunch of taxon- and country-specific projects for the endangered species. It might be cool to have a global “database” of these projects for better filter options regarding conservation status and a more complete picture of which species are endangered and how much. I have made a series of projects for ants and for bees in Germany so far, as an example of how these may look:

If this is something people are interested in, I’ll make a journal post to track progress and to add more details (stuff like: standardising these projects, or that species threatened by poaching should obviously not be added to these projects before having the conservation status and geo-privacy applied, etc…)
In any case, I thought it may be more engaging for everyone adding conservation statuses to make this a group effort rather than people doing it by themselves.

So anyway…
I’d like to hear what you think about this. Would you be interested in helping? Do you think this is even a good idea, or would you discourage it for some reason? :)

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It may be necessary to distinguish between formal political designations and listings from organisations with no legal power. Many invertebrates just don’t have enough data for formal protection, despite being labelled as endangered on sites like NatureServe.

I personally am not very interested in adding statuses, but I certainly won’t discourage it. <1% of the group I work with (mollusks) have even been evaluated for conservation, despite non-marine mollusks exceeding 40% of all recent extinctions. So conservation statuses don’t mean very much in my field, where most species probably do need protection but we don’t have enough data for a formal listing.

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Thank you.
Yes, the data (or rather lack thereof) will of course mean that there cannot be an objectively completed list. Personally, I use “Rote-Liste-Zentrum” as my source. It is the official authority in Germany, according to the BMUV (ministry for environment and a bunch of other stuff), but it certainly has no legal authority afaik. It is state-subsidised though, if that means anything.

For the first two lists I’ve partially worked through (ants and bees) I was surprised how much data there was. The next list will actually be molluscs, so I’m curious how it is there…

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