Global/Regional Assessment Protocol

The aim of this project is to globally assess the status of all marine chordates, and selected habitat-forming species and invertebrates under the IUCN Red List Criteria and Categories. The assessment rationale, supporting information and designated Red List category will then be placed on the Red List of Threatened Species, which denotes a global view. This is a considerable task, and involves extensive organization and rigorous data management.

Some species groups lend themselves well to doing a global assessment e.g. groupers and wrasses or mangroves. However, carrying out global assessments for some species groups can prove to be challenging due to numbers of species, workshop costs and logistics, and expertise coverage. Therefore assessments are often structured to cover a range of species within one geographic region. These regional assessments are then used to piece together the conservation status of species with large distributions. Regional assessments are also useful when assessing endemic species, which of course would be a global assessment as well as regional for those species.

Once a regional assessment has been completed, the data is then stored back in the master database, awaiting the next part of its range to be reviewed. In this way, the completion of the GMSA, and all associated workshops and assessments, will produce a final global assessment and a designated Red List category for each marine species, taking into account all the regional assessments.

For these reasons, before and during the workshops, all species accounts are marked as "global" within the SIS Database Entry System (DEM). This data field can be changed after the workshop in a separate subset copy of the regional species accounts, which will contain the regional data only. The other benefit of doing regional assessments is that analysis can be carried out in that region alone, as well as feeding into the larger global analysis.

Workshop experts: If you are invited to participate in a regional workshop, but have relevant global information on any of the species being assessed, we would be very happy if you could bring this information along to the workshop with you. Our main goal is to have global assessments for all species and your collaboration with other regional would be extremely helpful and much appreciated, reducing our increasingly heavy workload.