Species of the Day

Nothing on the card is written into this page except the name. The list this drawer rotates through holds a scientific name, a common name and a GBIF identifier — nothing else. The category, the classification, the record count, the countries and the dates are all fetched from GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, when you open the page. That is deliberate: it means this drawer cannot quietly go stale, and it cannot state a figure that nobody published.

The threat category is the real IUCN one, read through GBIF's /species/{key}/iucnRedListCategory, which needs no key. The colours on the scale are the Red List's own published category colours. The link on the card goes to that species' actual assessment, so the reasoning behind the category is one click away.

What this card does not show is population figures, and that is on purpose. The keyless route carries the category but not the population estimate or the trend; inventing a number to fill the gap is exactly the thing this cabinet does not do. So the card says what it can source and links to the assessment for what it cannot.

Some of these are not in trouble, and that is the point of using the real register. A few in the rotation are assessed Least Concern — sometimes because they were never threatened, sometimes because a recovery worked. A list curated to be uniformly bleak would say more about the curator than about the world.

Records held are occurrence records in GBIF — observations, specimens and survey rows — not a population count, and the countries are the countries those records came from, not a range map. Recording effort is wildly uneven between countries, so read them as a map of where people have been looking.