industry, posing an increasing threat to the unique and fearless wildlife studied by Darwin. While the island officially only had 17,000 inhabitants in 2000, many more arrived unrecorded, and some saw the national park as a nuisance and resorted to arson to clear land for their own use. The Galápagos Islands became Unesco's very first World Heritage Site in 1978, attracting yet more visitors. I...

The potential for conservation of individual species has been greatly advanced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) development of objective, repeatable, and transparent criteria for assessing extinction risk that explicitly separate risk assessment from priority setting. At the IV World Conservation Congress in 2008, the process began to develop and implement comparab...

Thorough evaluation has made the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List the most widely used and accepted authority on the conservation status of biodiversity. Although the system used to determine risk of extinction is rigorously and objectively applied, the list of threatening processes affecting a species is far more subjectively determined and has not had adequate re...

IUCN Category: Vulnerable, A2cd CITES Listing: Appendix I Scientific Names: Melursus ursinus (occasionally Ursus ursinus); Melursus ursinus ursinus in India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh; Melursus ursinus inornatus in Sri Lanka Common Names: sloth bear; Northern India and Nepal: bhalu; India: rinch, reech, richwa, asval, karadi, puni karadi, elugu bunti; Sri Lanka: walaha (male), waelahinna (f...

Cirsium semzinanicumsp. nov. (Asteraceae) is described as a new species from Hakkâri, Turkey. The new species is a part of the sect. Epitrachys (Cardueae) and similar to Cirsium karduchorum, from which it differs in morphological characters such as leaves, involucre, phyllaries, corolla, achens and pollen morphology. Geographical distribution, habitat and IUCN conservation status of this specie...