Read the assessment, not the badge

Updated September 2026

What the badge is

Critically Endangered, Endangered, and Extinct in the Wild are categories. They are not head-counts. This catalog shows the category Wikidata records for Kakapo and every other photographed animal here. That is a filing fact. The kakapo dossier is a door into the record, not a substitute for the assessors’ page.

IUCN assessments use lettered criteria — A through E — about decline, range, small population, and quantitative analysis. Two animals can share a CR badge for different reasons. One is a collapse in numbers. Another is a range that would fit in a single valley. Quoting the badge without the criterion is how a catalog gets misread as a scoreboard.

What to open on iucnredlist.org

Find the species, then read the year of the assessment, the criteria string, and the population field if one exists. A 2010 assessment and a 2024 assessment are not the same sentence. A category can also change because the species itself was redrawn, which is what happens when scientists split a species. If the page says the number is unknown, this site will not invent one. Population figures that appear in encyclopedia extracts can go stale; treat them as reported, then confirm.

What this catalog will not do

We do not copy Red List text. We do not flatten every animal into a pet-care FAQ. What “in crisis” means is the legend for three different facts: wild status, legal status, and invasive risk. Those are not interchangeable. If you only needed the badge decoded, you are done: confirm it on the Red List, then come back to the photograph and the dossier.