Many African conservation decisions such as funding, policy, species prioritization and nursery propagation implicitly treat the IUCN Red List as a complete map of extinction risk. It is not. For plants including trees, the biggest risk is not only that we mis-rank species, it’s that we overlook vast numbers of species that have never been globally assessed or have assessments that are decades old. So, how much plant diversity is assessed? Globally, one widely cited synthesis notes that of about 350,000 vascular plant species, the IUCN Red List documents about 62,666 species, or roughly 18%. That means most vascular plant species worldwide have no global Red List category to guide action. Africa illustrates the gap even more starkly. A comprehensive checklist of Mozambique’s vascular flora (compiled in July 2021) reported that although 1,667 taxa in the national checklist were registered on the IUCN Red List, the global extinction risk status for 76.5% of Mozambique’s vascular flora was not evaluated (including taxa explicitly categorized as not evaluated (NE) and taxa not listed on the IUCN Red List). At a broader (tropical Africa) scale, one peer-reviewed analysis of 22,036 green plant species found that only 2,856 had full IUCN assessments available (about 13%), and only 2,009 (9.1%) had assessments published after 2001. In other words, 87% of species had their assessments published a quarter century, or longer, ago. Flower and leaves of mngambo (Manilkara sansibarensis), a resilient East African tree known for its hard, termite-resistant wood and its small, sweet, edible fruit,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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