Abstract

The efforts and actions of conservation have been focused mainly in species or population levels. However, the UICN has recently developed an analogous methodology to the Red List of Threatened species to assess the risk of ecosystems following similar criteria, creating the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE). Among the most important challenges to the application of these criteria is the gathering and availability of information, which could represent a constraint. Our study presents a complementary method to integrate other sources of information to apply UICN-RLE, through the estimation of spatial and temporal quality of the information available in scientific publications. This method was used to assess 21 ecosystems in the central Chile biodiversity hotspot. We used spatially explicit studies that identified changes in ecosystem function or/and structure, allowing the quantification of reduction or disruption. The spatial and temporal quality of the assessment were estimated as the percentage of coverage of potential ecosystem distribution and the time frame suggested by UICN to each criteria, that the studies represents to each ecosystem. We were able to assess 85% of the ecosystems present in this area, which were classified with ranges of temporal quality between 30 to 100% and spatial quality from 12 to 100%. Eight of the 17 evaluated ecosystems had more than 50% of spatio-temporal quality, representing the 22.9% of the study area. Our methodology could be useful to facilitate the application of UICN red list criteria in other countries, improving the efforts to develop national or regional RLE as a tool for ecosystem conservation.