IUCN SSC Green Status of Species Task Force

Barney Long is the Senior Director of Conservation Strategies at Re:wild where he oversees all the species conservation efforts. He works on the conservation of highly endangered species and the site and thematic approaches required to achieve the recovery of their populations.

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford; I give lectures and tutorials to all three years of the programme, with a focus on conservation but including theoretical ecology, animal behaviour, statistics, and "soft" skills (writing, presentations).

My research is all about defining and measuring species recovery. Conservation biology has long focused on predicting and avoiding extinction, such that (until recently), there was no standard way to track species' progress toward recovery. I have helped lead the development of the IUCN Green Status of Species, which is a globally applicable framework to describe species recovery status and which complements the world-renowned IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The Green Status of Species draws on fundamental concepts in ecology- e.g., species functionality, viability, variability, and historic distribution.

I completed a PhD in Conservation Biology at the University of Central Florida (Orlando, USA), where my research focus was in transportation ecology (lethal and sub-lethal impacts of roads on wildlife ecology and behaviour). I then joined the Oxford Biology Department as NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellow and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, working with SSC to develop the IUCN Green Status of Species.