Endangered Species

An Endangered species is a species which has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List as likely to become extinct.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources is an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natural resources.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, founded in 1964, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species.

In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms, normally a species.

"Endangered" is the second most severe conservation status for wild populations in the IUCN's schema after Critically Endangered.

A critically endangered species is one which has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild.

The conservation status of a group of organisms indicates whether the group still exists and how likely the group is to become extinct in the near future.

In 2012, the IUCN Red List featured 3079 animal and 2655 plant species as endangered worldwide.

Plants, also called green plants, are multicellular eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae.

Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia.

The figures for 1998 were, respectively, 1102 and 1197.

Many nations have laws that protect conservation-reliant species: for example, forbidding hunting, restricting land development or creating preserves.

Conservation-reliant species are animal or plant species that require continuing species-specific wildlife management intervention such as predator control, habitat management and parasite control to survive, even when a self-sustainable recovery in population is achieved.

Environmental law - or "environmental and natural resources law" - is a collective term describing the network of treaties, statutes, regulations, and common and customary laws addressing the effects of human activity on the natural environment.

Hunting is the practice of killing or trapping any animal, or pursuing or tracking it with the intent of doing so.

Population numbers, trends and species' conservation status can be found in the lists of organisms by population.