IUCN has embarked on a new 2.5 year project to design a new version of the Species Information Service. As of this project, we are excited to announce the start of the consultation phase for the design of the new SIS. IUCN will be working with a company, Hex Digital, to design the key features and visualization for the new version of SIS. We invite you to participate in a brief SIS User Research Survey that will take approximately 5 minutes to complete. Your feedback will play a critical role in shaping the design and functionality of the new system.

Please note that the new SIS will include all the current features and functionality of the current system, but will also include the functionality of the currently separate SIS Connect platform within SIS to enable more seamless bulk data imports and exports. The new system will also include a geospatial component so that spatial data can be uploaded directly to assessments for editing and visualization alongside the narrative and tabular data and this will include functionality to compare the species ranges to other spatial datasets like the World Database on Protected Areas, etc. Hence it is not necessary to specify these needs in your responses to the survey.

The survey was available until December 6 and is now finished. Thank you for contributing to the future of SIS!

In March 2024, the Guidelines for Using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria were updated to version 16. To download the current version of the guidelines, visit the Red List Guidelines page on the website: https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/redlistguidelines.

The sRedList working group is happy to announce the release of the sRedList platform on the 24th of October.

The sRedList platform is a user-friendly web-interface developed by a team of Red List practitioners and ecological modellers (https://sredlist.eu/#/team) to support assessors in calculating and informing key assessment parameters.

For example, it will

• allow you to download and filter occurrence records,
• to create distribution maps,
• to calculate area of occupancy (AOO),
• to map trends in area of habitat or forest cover,
• to extract lists of countries of occurrence and habitat preferences,
• or to assess severe fragmentation

To discover more, you can already check the information and documentation available on the platform home page and register to access the platform https://sredlist.eu/#/home.

For each threat recorded, additional information is/may be recorded, some elements of which are required as part of the minimum documentation standards:

• timing of the threat (past, ongoing, future, unknown, etc.) [required]
• scope (how much of the population is impacted by the threat) [optional]
• severity (what is the impact of the threat) [optional]

Any analysis of the threats should preferably take into account the timing, scope and severity of the threats. Threats marked with timing as "ongoing", severity as "rapid" or "very rapid" declines and scopes of "majority" or "whole" are typically considered major threats to a species.

Prior to Red List version 2022-2, IUCN used a scoring scheme to quantify the impact of these variables and reported them in the Threats section of each assessment. Recognizing the underdeveloped scientific basis for these impact scores, IUCN temporarily stopped providing them beginning with Red List version 2022-2 while the technical basis for assigning threats and calculating threat impact scores is under review.