Neat conservation websites

General interest items found around the web.

Neat conservation websites

Postby cmsellers » Fri Jul 08, 2016 8:55 pm

I figured that I'd bring up two neat conservation-themed resources. The first a lot of you have probably seen, the second I suspect will be new to most of you.

The first is ARKive, which is dedicated to collecting media for all of the species on the IUCN redlist. Unfortunately, it makes no attempt to make any of that media free, in fact its terms of service forbid direct linking to individual images except for educational and conservation purposes. I find this a bit annoying, though a relatively standard attitude for academic and not-for-profit organizations, which tend to have an almost pathological fear of any of their work being exploited for commercial purposes. That said, the media it collects is amazing, and well worth a browse.

The other is the EDGE Foundation. An initiative of the Zoological Society of London, it suggests that species which represent a bigger portion of evolutionary history represent higher conservation priorities than specie which have close and non-endangered living relatives. (I would tend to agree with this, though I would also suggest that species which are either keystone species or represent unique niches should also have a higher priority.) To determine this, they've created a measure of "evolutionary distinctiveness" (ED) which they combine with its IUCN category (Global endangerment or GE) to get an EDGE score. You can discover some neat new species by looking through the "top 100" EDGE species in a given category.
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