The UK has a long tradition of recording and latterly of deciding on concepts of national rarity and threat. From Eversham’s 1983 treatise on it, there have been variants and additions, ending up with Nationally Rare, Nationally Scarce, and the well-known list of IUCN Threat categories. The recent progress of Species Status reviews Conservation designations for UK taxa – updates | JNCC - Adviser to Government on Nature Conservation has meant that species with legacy rarity and occasionally threat status values (some 30 to 40 years old), have now been moved onto the modern framework. However, if a family has not been subject to a review, then we are left with a range of aging status categories.
Within Pantheon, this resulted in an increasing cluttered screen output, full of Nb, Na, Notable, and other values which made it difficult to both read, summarise, and process.
We have now undertaken a process of "compactifying" these legacy values into discrete [Scarce] and [Rare] holders, the square bracket signifying a legacy value. Current conservation status values are derived from modern IUCN assessments, and these will grow in number as more families are subject to review. The numbers attached to each show the number of legacy values contained in each holder. The hyperlink allows unpacking of that holder.
We have also moved them onto their own line in the output for ease of reading. The same holds for threat categorisation. It is a bit of a moot point about whether you regard the legacy RDB2 Endangered status as a legacy rarity or threat, since some of these older values were almost hybrid entities and far from modern IUCN assessments.
In terms of audit, all original values persist and can be seen in the Data / Species Index screen. This revision only affects the output view.