Original paper
Full assessments of threatened and Near Threatened bryophyte species from the African continent with provisional conservation status
Araújo, Ana Claudia; Signorino, Giuseppe; Brummitt, Neil
172 references
published online: Jan 15, 2026
manuscript accepted: Oct 23, 2025
manuscript received: Sep 12, 2025
Abstract
This paper presents the assessment results of 125 species of bryophytes in continental Africa, from a sample of 1500 species randomly selected from around the world. This is part of a contribution towards one of the headline indicators of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the Red List Index, which measures trends in extinction risk of biodiversity. Assessments of the selected species followed the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria and represent a significant further step in the evaluation of threatened African bryophytes. Of these 125 species, 33 species are found to be threatened with extinction (either Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered) or are Near Threatened under IUCN Red List criteria, of which 27 species of these are formally assessed as threatened, across 20 African countries. One further species has a range below the Criterion B threshold for Vulnerable but is not facing any significant threats, while four poorly known species are here provisionally assessed as being Data Deficient. The other 84 species included in this sample of African species and presented in Table 1 are Least Concern, due to their large geographic ranges, therefore suggesting that 21.6% of African bryophytes overall are threatened with extinction. The most recurrent threat is ongoing, relentless, small-scale deforestation, followed by land conversion to agriculture and urban expansion, and most threatened bryophytes are those localised endemics known only from single or very few locations. A further 41 bryophyte species endemic to Madagascar and/or on other islands of the western Indian Ocean, including 5 that are also found in Africa, have already been treated in a separate publication.
Keywords
Africa • Bryophytes • IUCN Red List • Sampled Red List Index (SRLI) • threatened species