Glossary
What the words on this site mean, and how the site uses them.
A
- Authorship also authority
- The person who first formally described a species, and the year, shown after its scientific name.
C
- Class
- A rank below phylum. Mammals (Mammalia) and birds (Aves) are classes.
- Common name also vernacular name
- The everyday name for an animal in a given language.
- Critically Endangered also CR
- Red List category for species facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild. The highest threatened category.
D
- Data Deficient also DD
- Red List category for species assessed but with too little information to judge their risk.
E
- Endangered also EN
- Red List category for species facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild.
- Endemic
- Found naturally in one place and nowhere else.
- Extinct also EX
- Red List category for species of which no individuals remain.
- Extinct in the Wild also EW
- Red List category for species that survive only in captivity, in cultivation, or as populations well outside their natural range.
F
- Family
- A rank below order, gathering related genera. Animal family names end in -idae.
G
I
- Introduced also non-native
- Living in a place because people brought the species there, deliberately or by accident, rather than through natural spread.
- IUCN Red List
- The global assessment of how close each species is to extinction, published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
K
- Kingdom
- The broadest rank used here. All animals belong to the kingdom Animalia.
L
- Least Concern also LC
- Red List category for species assessed and found not to be at risk of extinction at present.
- Licence also Creative Commons, CC BY, CC0
- The terms under which a photo, recording, text or dataset may be reused.
- Life list
- A personal record of every species someone has seen.
N
- Near Threatened also NT
- Red List category for species close to qualifying as threatened, or likely to qualify soon.
- Not recorded
- This site’s label for a fact that none of its sources provide.
O
- Order
- A rank below class. Carnivora, the order of cats, dogs, bears and their relatives, is one.
P
- Phylum also phyla
- A major division of a kingdom, grouping animals that share a basic body plan.
R
- Rank
- A level in the classification hierarchy, such as genus, family or order.
S
- Scientific name also binomial, Latin name
- The formal two-part name of a species, written in italics: the genus, then the species.
- Sighting record also occurrence record
- A dated, located observation of a species, as collected by GBIF from museums, surveys and citizen-science projects.
- Size class
- This site’s five bands of adult body weight, used for filtering: tiny, small, medium, large and giant.
- Source
- The dataset a value was taken from. Every fact on this site links to its source.
- Species
- The basic unit of classification: a group of organisms treated as one kind and given a two-part scientific name.
- Subspecies
- A named population within a species that differs consistently from others, usually by region.
- Synonym
- An older or alternative scientific name for the same species, no longer the accepted one.
T
- Taxon also taxa
- Any named group in a classification, at any rank: a species, a family, a class.
- Threatened
- The collective term for the three Red List categories Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered.
V
- Vulnerable also VU
- Red List category for species facing a high risk of extinction in the wild. The lowest of the three threatened categories.