Conservation & Sustainability in 115 Flashcards: From the IUCN Red List to the 17 SDGs
Learn the nine IUCN Red List categories, the US Endangered Species Act and the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals with 115 real Flip It flashcards.
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Deck VQ4647 on Flip It is called Conservation & Sustainability and holds 115 cards — but read them in order and you meet two different courses stacked on top of each other. Cards 1 to 98 are an endangered-species and conservation-biology syllabus; the last 17 march through the UN Sustainable Development Goals, one card per goal. Split the deck in two and it stops feeling scattered.
Study this deck: Conservation & Sustainability
1 / 10Endangered species
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
Block one: the Red List ladder
The spine of the first block is the IUCN scale, nine cards in a row: EX (extinct), EW (extinct in the wild), CR (critically endangered), EN (endangered), VU (vulnerable), NT (near threatened), LC (least concern), DD (data deficient), NE (not evaluated). Learn those nine first — most of the later species cards hang off them, and one card reminds you that the official term threatened covers exactly CR, EN and VU.
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| What does EW mean in IUCN classification? | Extinct in the wild — known only to survive in captivity or as a naturalized population outside its historic range |
| Official IUCN term 'threatened' a grouping of | Three categories: critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable |
| Mexican wolf | The most endangered subspecies of the North American grey wolf, with approximately 143 living in the wild |
| Saimaa ringed seal | One of the most endangered seals in the world, living only in Lake Saimaa, Finland, with only about 400 individuals |
| 'shoot, shovel, and shut-up' method | When landowners kill and bury endangered animals or destroy habitat silently to remove the problem from their land |
| Why are amphibians good bioindicators? | They have very permeable skin that allows them to breathe and intake water, meaning they also absorb any air or water-soluble pollutants |
| SLOSS debate | A debate often considered in conservation planning about reserve design (Single Large Or Several Small) |
| Biodiversity hotspots | 44% of all vascular plants and 35% of all vertebrate species confined to 25 hotspots on only 1.4% of the Earth's land surface |
| SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production | Tracks national policy instruments, fossil fuel subsidies, domestic recycling, plastic waste |
Everything the first block covers
Conservation status and the IUCN itself; Biodiversity Action Plans and their 195 signatory countries; the golden lion tamarin on the 20 reais banknote; the California condor's wing tags; the Siberian tiger and the three extinct tiger subspecies; wildlife trafficking in Brazil, roughly 80% of it birds; the US Endangered Species Act, its consultation duty and its recovery plans; Canada's Species at Risk Act; CITES and the International Whaling Commission; invasive species; the 350 ppm threshold against a pre-industrial 280 ppm; ocean acidification, emperor penguins and the Salton Sea; captive breeding and the AZA's 450-plus Species Survival Plans; in-situ versus ex-situ conservation; bioindicators; the tragedy of the commons; Ashoka's edicts around 250 BC; landscape-scale conservation, island biogeography and biodiversity coldspots.
Block two: the 17 goals
The last 17 cards are a clean reference set — SDG 1 No Poverty through SDG 17 Partnerships for the Goals, each with its official wording and a few indicators. Study them backwards: the exam question and the news headline both say SDG 6 or SDG 14, never the full sentence, so drill number to goal first, then goal to indicators.
Two fixes before your first pass
Repair three cards. One card answers over 50% to "what percentage of the world's species are at risk of extinction", while a later card gives "up to 50% of all species" as a fifty-year projection — the first is that projection dressed up as a measurement (the figure usually cited today is the IPBES estimate of about one million threatened species out of eight million). The whale card lists six species then claims eight. And the card saying Japan hunts whales for "scientific purposes" predates Japan's 2019 withdrawal from the IWC, after which it resumed openly commercial whaling in its own waters.
Date the counted facts. The 143 Mexican wolves, the 1,556 US listed species, the nineteen recovered delistings and the 1°C of warming are all snapshots that have moved since. Add the year to the front of each — you want to memorise a dated statistic, not a moving target.
Ready to drill? Search deck VQ4647 — Conservation & Sustainability in your library on Flip It.
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