5 years of conservation assessments in Kew Bulletin 2000 - 2004

Kew Bulletin was one of the first journals to encourage authors to add statements on the conservation status of species. As far back as 2000 assessments were being published. I've been compiling the assessment and I now have 5 years of data, so thought it would be nice to have a look at it and see what it shows.

In 5 years a total of 504 conservation assessment statements were published. The chart below shows that there has been a fairly consistent growth over the years:

So what were the ratings? A mixture of methods were used to determine conservation status. In most cases the IUCN system was used, but others made general statement about threat level. I have grouped the terms into four simple categories: Threatened, Possibly Threatened, Not Threatened and Data deficient. The results are shown in the chart below:

Finally, I thought it might be interesting to see which families are getting the most attention when conservation assessments are concerned. Arecaceae and Lamiaceae amazingly are joint top with 99 assessments each!