This book represents the most comprehensive compilation of data on threatened vascular plants ever published. It includes the names of some 33,000 plant species determined to be rare or threatened on a global scale. Conservation assessments were provided by the IUCN Species Survival Commission, the National Botanical Institute (South Africa), Environment Australia, and CSIRO, The Nature Conservancy, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, together with hundreds of botanic gardens and botanists throughout the world. The Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and the New York Botanical Garden have made major in-kind contributions.The result of 20 years work by botanists and conservationists around the world, it is intended as a conservation tool, a provider of baseline information to measure conservation progress and as a primary source of data on plant species. Most importantly, however, it provides the building blocks on which to base a worldwide effort to conserve plant species.

The 1994 IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals was a major advance on its predecessors in clarity of layout and amount of information presented. This is taken further in the 1996 edition, which is also the first global compilation to use the complete new IUCN Red List category system.

"Wildlife in a Changing World" presents an analysis of the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Beginning with an explanation of the IUCN Red List as a key conservation tool, it goes on to discuss the state of the world s species and provides the latest information on the patterns of species facing extinction in some of the most important ecosystems in the world, highlighting the reasons behind their declining status. Areas of focus in the report include: freshwater biodiversity, the status of the world s marine species, species susceptibility to climate change impacts, the Mediterranean biodiversity hot spot, and broadening the coverage of biodiversity assessments."

Applies Red List data to calculate a Red List Index.

Discusses the various options for conserving plants at the level of the gene, species and community.

Release of the 2000 Red List is a major landmark for IUCN. It is the first time that listings of animals and plants have been combined and the first time that the Red List has been produced on CD-ROM. The 2000 Red List combines new assessmentsincluding all bird species, many antelope and bat species, most primates and sharks, all Asian freshwater turtles, more molluscs, and many otherswith those from previous publications. The combination of animals and plants into a single list containing assessments of more than 18,000 taxa (11,000 of which are threatened species) and the move towards improved documentation of each species on the list means that a hard-copy version of the Red List would run to several volumes. This, combined with the fact that the Red List will be updated annually, led to the decision to release the Red List in electronic format, via the World Wide Web and as a CD-ROM.

The flora of the Mediterranean islands includes many rare and localized species unique to the islands. Some of these are particularly threatened with extinction due to various pressures caused by people and their activities in Mediterranean ecosystems. It includes 50 descriptive sheets of species which are especially threatened, based on the IUCN Red List criteria. Each sheet gives a description of the species with illustrations and maps, emphasizing the threats to the species, existing conservation measures and additional measures needed for their conservation. Aimed at the layman, the text is easily accessible to the non-botanist.