Official state lists of endangered, threatened, or rare species

Following enactment of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973, a variety of organizations proceeded to establish lists of endangered, threatened, or rare species of wildlife that they believed fell within their purview. State lists, as opposed to regional or national lists, are of particular importance because they form a rigorous record of the status of species in small, well‐defined geographic areas. State lists also indicate the development status of legal management efforts in the various states and are, therefore, predictors of how rigorously species variety will be maintained. Online searches of environment, legal, and government indexes (Enviroline, NTIS, Agricola, and others) demonstrated that there is no organized way to identify official state lists and that, in fact, few official lists are cited within the voluminous environment literature.