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We have discussed the three levels of biodiversity (genetic, species and ecosystem) and reasons for protecting biodiversity and some of the threats. Next we will discuss how populations are measured, the categories of conservation and strategies we use to reduce the threats to biodiversity. The IUCN redlist (International Union for Conservation of Nature list of all known species and their conservation categories) defines critically endangered, endangered and threatened species according to their population size, distribution and likelihood of extinction.

This worksheet (conservation-case-studies) asks you to classify eight different species according to known data. Try to classify the local threatened species listed in the post below using the IUCN criteria. One of the commonly used methods for measuring the number of individuals in a population is “mark and recapture” or “tag and release”. We will do an experiment to simulate this process here (mark-and-recapture-expt).