Rare or Threatened Australian Plants, usually abbreviated to ROTAP, is a list of rare or threatened

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...

plant Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae excl ...

taxa. Developed and maintained by the

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research. CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO ...

(CSIRO), the most recent edition lists 5031 taxa. The list uses a binary coding system based on the

IUCN Red List The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biolo ...

categories for "Presumed Extinct", "Endangered", "Vulnerable", "Rare" or "Poorly Known". However, it also provides for additional information such as geographic range and occurrence in protected areas. It was first compiled in 1979, and published in 1981, with revisions published in 1988 and 1996. In its early days it was the only nationally recognised list of threatened plants, although it had no legal status. When the ''Endangered Species Protection Act 1992'' was proclaimed, the ROTAP list was used as a basis for the publication of schedules to the Act. A third list was produced by ANZECC from 1996. In 2000, the ''

Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 The ''Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999'' (Cth) is an Act of the Parliament of Australia that provides a framework for protection of the Australian environment, including its biodiversity and its natural and cult ...

'' (EPBC Act) was proclaimed. This superseded the ''Endangered Species Protection Act 1992'', and published a single list of threatened flora which largely superseded the three lists then current. As the EPBC list has legal force, the ROTAP list is now little used. It continues to be maintained, however, and is often used and referred to in scientific publications.

References

* {{threatened species Botany in Australia Nature conservation in Australia Endangered species

See also

References