Open Questions

Open Honey Bee

Why It Is Open Agricultural census data counts managed hives reported by beekeepers, but no comprehensive survey exists of wild and feral honey bee colonies, so no total-species population figure can be assembled from what is currently measured.

What Would Settle It A coordinated global survey methodology for wild and feral colonies, comparable to the managed-hive agricultural census already conducted in most countries.

Expertise Needed Apiculture and conservation biology

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Life.

Open Saguaro Cactus

Why It Is Open Regional density surveys exist within protected areas such as Saguaro National Park, but the IUCN's own assessment does not extrapolate them into a single rangewide total, so no honest total-population figure can be given.

What Would Settle It A coordinated rangewide census across the full Sonoran Desert distribution, extending the plot-based methods already used inside individual protected areas.

Expertise Needed Botany and desert ecology

Question posed in IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Open Vaquita

Why It Is Open The vaquita is now so rare, and lives in waters turbid enough, that acoustic monitoring (detecting echolocation clicks) and visual survey vessels give estimates that disagree year to year, and an unknown number of individuals likely go undetected by either method entirely.

What Would Settle It Sustained, well-funded acoustic and visual monitoring across several consecutive seasons, combined with genetic sampling to estimate the population from DNA left in the environment, a technique already piloted for this species.

Expertise Needed Marine mammal conservation biology and bioacoustics

Question posed in IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Open Amazon River Dolphin

Why It Is Open World Land Trust's own species page states there are no range-wide estimates of abundance or population trends for Inia geoffrensis, only regional survey data; a 22-year standardized count in Brazil's Mamirauá Reserve documents a sustained decline, and Brazilian Amazon surveys separately estimate a 6.7 percent annual population decline, but no basin-wide census across the Amazon, Orinoco and Madeira systems has ever been completed.

What Would Settle It A coordinated, standardized survey across the full range (Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia) using consistent transect methodology, of the kind already run locally in the Mamirauá Reserve, extended basin-wide and repeated on a regular interval.

Expertise Needed Population ecology / conservation biology

Question posed in Amazon River Dolphin (World Land Trust), Species page, population section.

Open Cacao (Theobroma cacao)

Why It Is Open Cultivated cacao is grown across the tropics in the billions of trees, but the ancestral wild population in the Amazon basin has never been adequately censused, which is why the IUCN rates the species Data Deficient rather than assigning it a threat category with a population figure.

What Would Settle It A systematic field survey of wild Theobroma cacao stands across the Amazon basin, of the kind IUCN Red List assessors have run for better-studied tree species.

Expertise Needed Conservation botany / field ecology

Question posed in Theobroma cacao (Wikipedia).

Open Coffee Plant (Coffea arabica)

Why It Is Open The IUCN Endangered rating for wild Coffea arabica is built from range decline and climate-suitability modeling rather than a direct wild census with a published number, so how many wild individuals remain in the Ethiopian, South Sudanese and Yemeni highland forests is not established.

What Would Settle It A range-wide field census of wild Coffea arabica stands across its native Ethiopian, South Sudanese and Yemeni highland forests.

Expertise Needed Conservation botany / field ecology

Question posed in Coffea arabica (Wikipedia).

Open Bolson Tortoise

Why It Is Open The only published population estimate for the Bolson tortoise, fewer than 10,000 individuals, comes from research published in 1991 using data collected in 1983. No more recent field census of the wild population was found.

What Would Settle It A current field survey of the Bolson de Mapimi population, comparable in method to the 1983 study, to establish whether the species has declined further since its 2018 uplisting to Critically Endangered.

Expertise Needed Conservation Biology

Question posed in Bolson Tortoise (Wikipedia), Population section.

Open Indri

Why It Is Open Published population estimates for the indri range from 1,000 to 10,000 individuals, a full order of magnitude of uncertainty, reflecting how little of its fragmented eastern Madagascar rainforest range has been systematically surveyed.

What Would Settle It A systematic acoustic or transect survey across the indri's remaining rainforest fragments, standardised so counts from different reserves can be summed without double counting.

Expertise Needed Population Ecology

Question posed in Indri (Wikipedia), Population section.

Open Wild Silk Moth

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article on Bombyx mandarina, fetched live for this pass, carries no IUCN Red List conservation status; the species may be unassessed or assessed only in a specialist source not consulted here.

What Would Settle It An IUCN Red List entry, or a Lepidoptera-specific conservation assessment, naming a status for Bombyx mandarina.

Question posed in Bombyx mandarina (Wikipedia).

Open Earthworm

Why It Is Open Agricultural and ecological surveys count earthworm abundance locally, but no comprehensive census aggregates the roughly 7,000 known earthworm species across all soils worldwide, and population density varies enormously by soil type, moisture, and land use.

What Would Settle It A coordinated global soil biodiversity survey standardizing earthworm sampling methodology across biomes and land-use types.

Expertise Needed Soil ecology and edaphology

Question posed in Earthworm (Wikipedia), As an invasive species section, species count sentence.

Open Bird-of-paradise

Why It Is Open Population studies exist for some individual birds-of-paradise species, but the 44 species in the family are not tracked under one combined census, and several inhabit remote New Guinea forest interiors that have never been comprehensively surveyed.

What Would Settle It Species-by-species population surveys across the full range of Paradisaeidae, aggregated into one family-wide estimate.

Expertise Needed Ornithology and conservation biology

Question posed in Bird-of-paradise (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, family size sentence.

Open Rafflesia

Why It Is Open Rafflesia lives almost entirely as thread-like tissue hidden inside a host vine and only becomes visible when it briefly flowers, so no reliable method exists to count total individuals, only the flowers observed at any given time.

What Would Settle It Genetic sampling of host Tetrastigma vines to detect latent Rafflesia infections independent of flowering, combined with systematic habitat surveys.

Expertise Needed Conservation botany

Question posed in Rafflesia (Wikipedia), Description section, no-leaves-stems-roots sentence.

Open Stingray

Why It Is Open Fisheries and conservation bodies track catch and status data species by species, but no single stock assessment aggregates population across all roughly 220 stingray species and eleven families.

What Would Settle It Coordinated global elasmobranch population assessments combining fishery, bycatch, and habitat survey data across all stingray families.

Expertise Needed Marine biology and fisheries science

Question posed in Stingray (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, species count sentence.

Open Yellowjacket

Why It Is Open Yellowjacket colonies are annual and mostly die off each winter, with only mated queens overwintering to found new nests, so no comprehensive census tracks total colony or individual numbers across the many Vespula and Dolichovespula species and their ranges.

What Would Settle It Standardized trapping and nest-density surveys repeated across regions and seasons for every yellowjacket species.

Expertise Needed Entomology

Question posed in Yellowjacket (Wikipedia), Nesting section, one-season sentence.

Open Sphagnum

Why It Is Open Peatland mapping is incomplete in remote boreal and arctic regions, and existing global wetland inventories do not isolate the area or biomass specifically dominated by Sphagnum from other peat-forming vegetation.

What Would Settle It Satellite-based global peatland mapping cross-referenced with species-level vegetation surveys distinguishing Sphagnum-dominated bogs from other peatland types.

Expertise Needed Peatland ecology and remote sensing

Question posed in Sphagnum (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, species count sentence.

Open Baobab

Why It Is Open As of the cited source (Wikipedia, current to February 2025), the African baobab has not yet been classified by the IUCN Red List, even though there is evidence its populations may be declining. This atlas's conservation-status property is a closed enum of assessed categories (Least Concern through Critically Endangered, plus Data Deficient), and none of them honestly represents the simple absence of any assessment, so no property value was written.

What Would Settle It A future IUCN Red List assessment publishing a conservation-status category for Adansonia digitata, at which point the live category can be recorded directly on the species entity.

Expertise Needed Conservation biology, IUCN Species Survival Commission assessment

Question posed in Adansonia digitata (Wikipedia).

Open Common Raven

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article consulted for this species gives no single global population figure; secondary web results cite conflicting uncited totals (roughly 16 million versus 29 million) with no raw source page fetched to confirm either.

What Would Settle It A dated global population estimate from a named, fetchable source (BirdLife International DataZone, Partners in Flight, or the IUCN Red List assessment page) with a verbatim figure this atlas can cite directly.

Expertise Needed Ornithology

Question posed in Common Raven (Wikipedia), Population section (absent).

Open Green Sea Turtle

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article consulted states the IUCN reclassified the species from endangered to least concern in 2025 and that the population has risen about 28 percent since the 1970s, but gives no absolute global count of individuals or nesting females; regional nesting-female counts exist but no consolidated global total was found in the source consulted.

What Would Settle It A consolidated global population figure (total individuals or total nesting females) from the 2025 IUCN Red List assessment (Seminoff et al., article e.T4615A285108125) or an equivalent named, fetchable source.

Expertise Needed Marine biology

Question posed in Green Sea Turtle (Wikipedia), Population section (absent).

Open White Stork

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article consulted gives only scattered national and regional breeding-pair counts (for example Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria); a secondary web search found a BirdLife-attributed figure of roughly 700,000 individuals worldwide, but the BirdLife DataZone factsheet page itself is JavaScript-rendered and no raw verbatim figure could be fetched from it this pass.

What Would Settle It A verbatim global population figure fetched directly from the BirdLife DataZone factsheet, the European Red List of Birds PDF, or an equivalent named source this atlas can cite with a real locator and quote.

Expertise Needed Ornithology

Question posed in White Stork (Wikipedia), Population section (absent).

Open Harpy Eagle

Why It Is Open The cited English language Wikipedia article on the harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) gives no total population number or range anywhere in its text; a full-article search this pass found only regional decline and extirpation patterns, no comprehensive count.

What Would Settle It A dedicated IUCN Red List population assessment, or a peer reviewed range wide survey, stating a number of mature individuals or total adults for the species as a whole.

Expertise Needed conservation biology

Question posed in Harpy Eagle (Wikipedia), Population section, absent from article.