Reptiles at Risk: Adding Madagascar’s Lizards and Snakes to the IUCN Red List

If you’ve ever read updates on the conservation status of species (such as the updates released this week), you may wonder who makes these calls — and how they’re made.

To answer that question, I point you back to January. That is when many of the world’s leading experts on the reptiles of Madagascar gathered in the nation’s capital, Antananarivo, to evaluate the conservation status of each of the island’s species of lizards and snakes in a five-day workshop. This work was invaluable in generating the results that, this week, were added to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species — the globally recognized standard for measuring extinction risk. This project forms part of the ongoing Global Reptile Assessment, a CI-IUCN initiative to assess the conservation status of each of the world’s approximately 9,500 species of reptile; this effort is organized and run through the Biodiversity Assessment Unit based in Conservation International’s head office in Arlington, Va.

You can read the full story HERE.