I’m new to IUCN, and I noticed that insects aren’t listed on the chart above. Could this be because they’re considered data deficient? Apparently IUCN does assess insects to some extent, so I’m curious to learn more about this.
iNaturalist has many biases — as we’ve discussed in a recent forum thread — but it’s also an incredibly powerful tool for assessing biodiversity!
Of course it’s not an issue of OR, meaning IUCN OR iNaturalist. It’s AND! IUCN AND iNaturalist! The more survey tools we have, the better!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on IUCN data, and how IUCN and iNaturalist can work together for conservation!
There are a million insect species (and even more undescribed), so I wager that less than .1% have conservation status at any level of government or NGO globally. There are some efforts to monitor insect populations for monarchs and bumblebees, but that’s not the norm.
For some groups of freshwater mollusks, like Sphaeriidae, it’s often unclear which species are native and which ones are introduced, let alone their risk of extinction. I hope in the future there would be enough data to actually sort these mollusks out
Not exactly freshwater - but there’s been significant research and work here on restoring natural oyster reefs (which had become functionally extinct around the mainland).
One of the really interesting things they’ve learned is that the sound of snapping shrimp drives ongoing recruitment. The oysters are apparently attracted to it as a sign of a healthy habitat, and they’ve been playing those sounds as part of bootstrapping restored reef sites in places they had previously been eliminated from.
