Citizen Science platforms are vital for the Red List of the Ecosystems (RLE) to fill data vacuum, especially on biotic processes or interactions, says Professor David A. Keith, lead of RLE thematic group and Chair of RLE Committee for scientific standards. Such platforms foster collaboration between citizens and scientists, and help in building information needed for management and protection of native ecosystems, he adds.
Ecosystems across the globe are degrading fast, thereby reducing their ability to sustain life. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) launched the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, a global framework, in 2014 to assess the risks to ecosystems and to focus attention on where ecosystems are threatened.
“The RLE is a tool that helps us understand the risks posed to ecosystems and also how to reduce those risks. We need to fill gaps in information in order to undertake these vital assessments to support our decision making. Citizen Science initiatives are an incredibly important source of information for this. For example, understanding the functionality of river systems, knowing which species depend on particular ecosystem types and where they are found in the landscape, and most importantly where the last of their kind actually remain so that we can protect them” says Professor Keith. He was in the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI), Peechi, recently for the Asia Consultative Workshop on RLE.
The Citizen Science initiatives in India can provide crucial data and empower people to participate. It broadens community engagement beyond specialists and fosters collaboration between citizens and scientists, creating a valuable opportunity to gather conservation information collectively, he says.
The Centre for Citizen Science and Biodiversity Informatics, a recent initiative of KFRI, is operating a number of citizen science projects such as mapping of biodiversity in forest and agriculture landscapes and riverine ecosystems, mapping of roosting sites of fruit bats and mapping of invasive species and pollinators. “These projects will help in developing big data for the species and ecosystem assessment processes and their conservation” says Dr. Peroth Balakrishnan, Head of the Department of Wildlife Biology, KFRI.
Prof. Keith says that “the IUCN is working with the Centre for Biodiversity Informatics to build a brand-new inventory. . And this has great potential to feed into the Red List of Ecosystem Assessments under the IUCN”.
Monitoring ecosystem status can help gain insights into both the negative impacts of degradation and the positive outcomes from conservation efforts. Since 2014, the RLE has seen application in 100 countries across all continents, with over 4,000 ecosystem units assessed at different spatial scales. The only ecosystem assessed from India so far is the Sundarbans mangroves.
The RLE has a set of global standards to assess conservation status of ecosystems, applicable at local, national, regional and global levels. Naming of the risk categories of the ecosystems are almost similar to the IUCN redlist of threatened species and include eight categories namely, Collapsed (CO), Critically endangered (CR), Endangered (EN), Vulnerable (VU), Near Threatened (NT), Least Concern (LC), Data Deficient (DD) and Not Evaluated (NE). RLE protocol includes five criteria for assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse such as reduction in geographic distribution, restricted geographic distribution, environmental degradation, disruption of biotic processes or interactions and quantitative analysis that estimates the probability of ecosystem collapse.
