The assessment of species under the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List Categories and Criteria are based on extinction risk theory. To date, over 70,000 species have been assessed for the IUCN Red List, including a growing fraction of marine species. These marine assessments have largely been carried out over the past 10 years through an initiative named the Global Marine Species Assessment, based at Old Dominion University. The utility of Red List Assessments in conservation planning and biodiversity monitoring is well established. With a growing data set of a suite of keystone marine species, the use of Red List Assessments in Mitigation and Adaptation Research is now feasible.

Kent Carpenter is a Professor in Biological Sciences at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he has been in residence since 1996. He completed undergraduate studies in Biology at the Florida Institute of Technology and his graduate studies in Zoology at the University of Hawaii. He was a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer and a post-doctoral research associate in the Philippines, a marine scientist at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, and a Senior Fisheries Research Officer of the the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome. His primary research interests are marine conservation biology, systematics and evolution of fishes, ecology of coral reefs, and marine biogeography and phylogeography of the Indo-West Pacific.

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