Updating IUCN Red List conservation statuses

[mftasp]

This has reared its head again, so I’m looking for solutions.

If an IUCN status is overridden to unobscure the coordinates, will this automatically be undone next time there is an update?

If so what is the best way to remedy this? Species like E. tenuiramis are not considered in any way threatened, but since they are so abundant, it would be unlikely one would find a formal assessment to link to to override the IUCN status with a local one.

[loarie]

As described in this post, the update did not alter geoprivacy for existing global IUCN RedList statuses. But when we created new global IUCN RedList statuses when none existed we did set geoprivacy to match the default position indicated by the status (e.g. LC,DD=open, otherwise=obscured). I assume the latter is what you’re noticing?

Our ambition is to have all IUCN RedList global conservation status geoprivacy align with the ‘default position’ indicated by the status unless the status has a link to a flag in the description documenting the why we want geoprivacy to be ‘open despite being threatened’ or ‘obscured despite being secure’. But it will take lots of work by curators to get there - thanks for helping make this happen.

So the way we ran this update script this time around and plan to continue running it at least for the short term is:
For existing statuses, we will not change geoprivacy even when a status updates, but this is creating a big backlog of work that needs to be done by curators to go through theses situations where geoprivacy=default position indicated by status and either change the geoprivacy to the default position or document the ‘deviation’ in a flag.

For new statuses where none exist, we are automatically obscuring taxa, its up to curators to proactively open up these statuses when they want to deviate by changing the geoprivacy and documenting the change in a flag.

Thanks for not just documenting the decision to ‘deviate’ on IUCN global statuses in a flag but also linking to the flag in the status description as I’ve done here https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/401767-Eucalyptus-tenuiramis

We’d like to get to a place where the update script is updating geoprivacy on existing statuses when there’s no documented deviation but we’re not doing that now and will raise that here before making that change. So Re: E. tenuiramis since there’s an existing status the update script won’t change geoprivacy. And even if we altered the update to start updating geoprivacy, now that it has a link to a flag in the conservation status description the geoprivacy would be left as is.

Lastly, when we ran this update ~Sept 2021, IUCN was in Version 2021-2. Our plan is to run this update when IUCN updates which is usually annually/biannually. I assume that will be whenever they release Version 2022-1

Does that help?

[mftasp]

Very much so, thanks @loarie!

There will be a large number of taxa that are not threatened in any way, but that meet IUCN criteria for statuses such as NT due to their endemic status to a small area, relatively small population, etc. Many of these are adequately reserved, or threatened by processes such as habitat fragmentation or land clearing, and not by collecting, trapping, trampling, and so on.

I can see how this works, and I am happy to play along, but I’d like it recorded that, as a curator in an island where many non-threatened taxa are in the IUCN list for reasons mentioned above, this may increase my workload substantially, and I think it is wrong to automatically obscure a taxon that is not specifically threatened by making its location public.