For an extra read . . . Scientists put forward plan to create universal species list: Single classification system could end centuries of disagreement and improve global efforts to tackle biodiversity loss For example, scientific evidence indicates the African elephant could be two species – the forest elephant and the savanna elephant. Yet major conservation organisations such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) only acknowledge one. “The general public are identifying with these entities they call species and they think they’re real biological, natural units rather than being a slice in time that is a human construct,” said the lead author Stephen Garnett, a professor of conservation and sustainable livelihoods at Charles Darwin University in Australia. A widely used definition of a species centres on whether a group of living things can exchange DNA by creating viable offspring. But in several cases, the lines between species are blurred, causing disagreement between taxonomists – the scientists who discover, name and classify species. New techniques, including genomic analysis and micro CT scans, have also prompted scientists to discover that organisms previously thought to be one species may, in fact, be several, such as south-east Asian leaf monkeys, giraffes and walking sharks. “For probably 90% of the species, there are natural units, they don’t interbreed and they’re well behaved. But there’s 10% that are busy evolving and we have to make this decision about what is the species and is not,” said Garnett. “The public is expecting science to be able to do that. And science hasn’t got a system for doing it reliably.”With at least 26 competing concepts, biologists have never reached agreement over what constitutes a species, the most basic classification of an organism. As a result, conservation organisations, national governments and scientists often use separate lists of mammals, fungi and other organisms with differing taxonomic descriptions.