A participative approach to prioritise actions for parasite red listing

Abstract

Parasite red listing is in its infancy, and national red lists for parasites are lacking. The first challenge is the meagre data availability for metazoan parasites of animals that the IUCN SSC Parasite Specialist Group strives to assess. Indeed, parasites of medical importance to humans, or posing a problem to the health of domestic animals, are not covered by this young specialist group; hence, most of the target species are strongly understudied parasites. Moreover, procedures to formally assess more parasite species for inclusion in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species might require optimisation and innovation of existing criteria. During a recently organised workshop on conservation and Red Listing of parasites, experts (either in parasitology or conservation) undertook a collaborative effort to determine priorities enabling the assessment of metazoan parasites of animals. We applied an adapted version of the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), a method of stakeholder elicitation aiming for a consensus. We covered five themes: (1) threats; (2) challenges of complex life cycles; (3) differences between global versus regional scales; (4) perceptions and ethics; (5) data availability and uncertainty. During a first, real-life round of NGT, for each theme, five priority challenges were determined. A second, online round was used to select an action to prioritise in response of each challenge. This structured approach enabled us to reach a consensus, supported by diverse experts with relevant backgrounds, on steps to be taken at the onset of the assessment of the conservation status of metazoan parasites of animals.