The place goes first

Updated September 2026

What habitat loss means here

On a dossier, “where” is often a country pin we could attach from Wikidata, not a GIS range. The map is a door into those pins. It is not a complete atlas of remaining forest. When an encyclopedia article says a species is restricted to a named park or a named island, that is a reported place, not a guarantee the park still holds the animal.

The Sumatran orangutan is the photographed example because the crisis is the forest, not a pet shop. Oil palm, logging, and roads cut a range into patches. A CR badge on that page is not a licence to keep one. It is a record that the wild population is in the worst IUCN categories this catalog publishes.

How to read a place on a dossier

If a country pin exists, it means Wikidata had an endemic-to or location statement we could reduce to a country. Many animals have no pin. That is a missing field, not a missing animal. GBIF dots on a species map follow where people recorded the taxon — museum drawers and roadside surveys included. They are not a habitat model.

What we will not invent

We will not publish a remaining-hectare figure we cannot source. We will not rank which forest loss is “worse.” Open iucnredlist.org for the threat text the assessors wrote, then use this catalog for the photograph and the other animals that share the same country pin or the same class.