The Species Black List

1. Tell somebody

The single most useful thing anyone can do is make these species less obscure. Conservation funding follows attention, and attention follows people talking. A species that nobody has heard of does not get a recovery plan.

Share this site. Send a page to somebody who would find it interesting. If you work anywhere near this field, put it in front of the person who signs off your grants.

Here is one you can steal:

2. Photograph things you cannot name

This sounds too easy to matter. It is not. Species get rediscovered because somebody posted a picture of something odd and a specialist happened to scroll past it.

Here is how that actually plays out. In August 2014, Scott Trageser, who built this site and is Executive Director of The Biodiversity Group, was running a citizen science survey on the island of Hòn Cau in Vietnam. He came across a land snail nobody present could identify and posted it to iNaturalist, largely to set an example for the children he was teaching: when you find something you cannot name, this is what you do with it.

More than a year later a malacologist in Malaysia, Junn Kitt Foon, came across the photograph, recognized the shell, and got in touch. It was Myxostoma petiverianum, whose last published record was from 1905, and the photograph was the first ever taken of a live adult. They published it together.

No expedition. No permit. No budget. A photograph left somewhere public, one person on the other side of the world who knew what he was looking at, and a lesson for a class that turned out to be worth rather more than the lesson.

So: if you see something you cannot name, especially somewhere remote, at night, or very small, photograph it and upload it with a location. You do not need to identify it. That is the whole point of putting it where the people who can will find it.

Mongabay's account of the rediscovery

3. Ask for these species to be prioritized

Every species on this site is excluded from the commitments that drive conservation spending, because those commitments are written around species already known to be threatened. Changing that is a matter of people asking for it, repeatedly, in the places where lists get written.

• If you fund conservation: ask whether your criteria quietly rule out species with no assessment. Most do, without anyone intending it.
• If you work for an agency or a government: Data Deficient and unassessed species can be written into national priorities even though the global targets skip them.
• If you are a researcher: an assessment is a publishable contribution, and these are the species where one assessment changes the whole picture for a taxon.
• If you are a conservationist: a survey that produces no sighting is still a result worth reporting, and almost nobody publishes those.

4. Support the people already doing it

This work is unglamorous and it is nearly always unfunded. Finding a small brown frog on a steep hillside at 2am does not elicit the same interest as finding a tiger, and the organizations that do it are small.

The Biodiversity Group built this site and works on exactly these species. If you would like to back that, or do it with us, both doors are open:

• Donate, which pays for the fieldwork that turns a name on this list into a record.
• Get involved, including expeditions and internships if you want to be there when it happens.

If your money or your time is better placed with another group working on neglected species, place it there instead. The point is the species, not us.

Donate now

5. Help build the databases that do not exist yet

Everything this site can say about vertebrates rests on checklists that volunteers built. The Reptile Database, AmphibiaWeb, the Mammal Diversity Database and the IOC bird list are each a handful of people keeping a checklist current, and they are the reason we can say how many snakes exist and when one was last seen.

Invertebrates and plants have almost none of that, and it shows everywhere on this site. They are 794 of the 2,120 lost species here, we could not compute a single per-group rate for them because no authority publishes a count to divide by, and of the 461 invertebrates across our lists, not one is named by any conservation organization we can find.

So the ask: if you know a group, be its record keeper. A checklist for one beetle family or one orchid genus, published with a date on it and kept current, is the same act that became the Reptile Database. Put your specimen records and photographs where GBIF can index them, because a record no database can see is a species this site cannot watch. And if you are building one and want our data, our scripts or our mistakes to learn from, write to us and take them; everything here is free.