Better SAFE than sorry

[Extract] We welcome the debate that our proposed species' ability to forestall extinction (SAFE) index (Front Ecol Environ 2011; 9[9]: 521–525, this issue) has attracted from our peers (see previous letters by Akçakaya et al., Beissinger et al., and McCarthy et al.), because it has further emphasized the need for a more heuristic measure of species extinction threat. The main points of contention can be summarized as follows: (1) SAFE merely echoes the existing IUCN Red List categorization and is therefore redundant; (2) SAFE should not be proffered as a replacement for the Red List; (3) SAFE simplifies mathematically to a measure of a species' abundance and therefore provides no additional risk information; and (4) minimum viable population (MVP) size, on which SAFE is based, is species-specific and so a threshold abundance applied to all species cannot be used. We outline below why each of these arguments is unsupported.

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment

9

1540-9309

N/A

9

2