Paul Nurse and assessing the health of Australian trees

Trees mean a lot to people.

A lot of people, they climbed a tree when they were a kid, or they planted a tree with their parents, or they have some memory of being with a beautiful, magnificent, big tree.

This is Rachel Gallagher, a plant ecologist and conservation scientist at Western Sydney University.

I think that's what I like most about trees, is just how massive they are.

[laughs] They're just so massive.

It's so amazing to be around a big old tree.

It's a good thing Rachel loves trees so much.

She and others today are part of a massive undertaking to assess the conservation status of every single Australian tree species.

It just takes some time and grit and, yes, funding.

It all started way back in the 1990s when someone thought it was a good idea to make sure every tree in the world was officially named.

named.Once that was complete in the mid-2000s, the Global Tree Search was made public.

Then some other bright spark decided to use that information to find out how many of our planet's tree species were threatened with extinction, and so the Global Tree Assessment was born.

The collaboration began in, 11 years ago [laughs] in 2015, and set off to assess the 57,800-ish tree species that were identified through the Global Tree Search.

So that sounds enormous, and it is, but you just chip away at it with time, and the Global Tree Assessment has been a, a wonderful effort to work towards a goal of having a Red List assessment for every tree species.

The Red List is a global list assessing the risk of extinction and guiding conservation efforts for life on our planet.

It's overseen by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or the IUCN, and to date 169,000 species have been documented and their risk of extinction or their conservation status assessed.

But why do we need a global assessment of our planet's species?

It's useful to have a global list because we live in an interconnected world, and understanding species risk in the context of the world is important because biodiversity kind of transcends these borders.

This is Dr. Ella Pleurmans-Putaot.

So for example, there can be a species that exists in multiple countries, and so extinction prevention efforts are best sort of coordinated at this global level or understood at this global level so that we can protect species most effectively and direct resources in a way that's equitable and fair.

I am one of the two Red List authority coordinators for the IUCN Australian Plant Species Specialist Group.

Gee, that's a mouthful.

And [laughs] I'm also a lecturer in botany at Deakin University.

To recap, for the past 11 years, people from all over the world have been working towards the ambitious goal of assessing the extinction risk of every known tree species.

Ella is part of the Australian team leading the effort, the Plant Species Specialist Group.