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An important responsibility of ORNHIC is to review and rank rare, threatened, and endangered species of Oregon. We assign Heritage Ranks to animals, plants, and fungi that are or may become rare in Oregon. Heritage Ranks are decided through expert review, discussion, input from interested parties, and trends in sightings and population data.
Heritage Ranks
The Heritage Ranks are a part of an international ranking system first developed by The Nature Conservancy and now managed by NatureServe. This system is used by Heritage programs in all 50 states in the USA, at the 8 Canadian Conservation Data Centres, and network partners in several Latin American countries. A brief definition of these ranks can be found here. You can find more detailed discussion of these ranks at NatureServe's Conservation Status page.
In addition to ranking each species' conservation status, Heritage programs also rank each occurrence, or population group, of species that are found in each state. If you are interested in learning how we rank occurrences, see the Ranking Species Occurrences - A Generic Approach article by NatureServe, updated in January 2008. More background information on occurrence ranking can be found at the Heritage Conservation Status Assessment Factors draft publication from June 2002.
State and Federal Ranking Systems
In addition to our Heritage Ranks, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Oregon Department of Agriculture also rank species. We include these rankings in our publication, Rare, Threatened and Endangered Species of Oregon.
You can view the current ODFW and USFWS rankings for vertebrates at ODFW's Wildlife Division. ODFW has also compiled a Sensitive Species list to address species which are not currently considered threatened but which may need proactive protection to maintain their populations. Current ODA plant listings are found at their Plant Conservation pages.
In 2004 ORNHIC was asked to aid the Oregon Bureau of Land Management with an Environmental Impact Statement regarding their Survey and Manage program. ORNHIC ranked all 312 Survey and Manage species. You can read more about ORNHIC's involvement and see the resulting ranks here.
Rare, Threatened, and Endangered Species of Oregon
ORNHIC publishes this book every two or three years with updated ranks for rare species in Oregon. The latest version of the RTE book was published in 2007 and is available as a PDF file at our Publications and Reports page. You can also download spreadsheets of the rankings for specific species groups at our Data Download page.
PDF versions of the 2004 and 2001 editions of the book are also available at our Publications page. Paper copies of older editions of the book may be available. If you are interested in these paper editions, please contact lindsey.koepke@oregonstate.edu. Future editions of the RTE book will be available as a PDF file only.
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