ENG 100: College Reading and Learning Strategies

The following websites and encyclopedias are great places to start searching for information about your endangered species. 

Step 1: Find your species listed as endangered or critically endangered on at least one of these lists:

• the IUCN Red List, 
• the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's Endangered Species List, or
• the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's ESA Threatened and Endangered List.

Step 2: Use these lists to find basic information about your species' behaviors and status.

Step 3: Use other Reference Sources to find any basic information that was not included in the two lists.

Step 4: Use journal articles to find more up to date studies on particular aspects of your species' lives, i.e. mating behavior, conservation efforts, communication, etc.

Search Suggestions

• Find the animal’s scientific name; many researchers may refer to it by that instead of its common name.
• “Re-search” means to search again, so you will probably have to do multiple searches across multiple resources.
• When searching for journal or magazine articles, combine your species' name with and aspect of your project like habitat or diet; you can also search for a reason it might be endangered: farming, industrialization, climate change, etc.

Reference sources are summaries of facts, definitions, histories, statistics, and other types of information on large subject areas, organized for quick look up.

• They are sometimes called “background” sources.
• You use these to gain a basic understanding of a concept or issue before moving on to more advanced sources of information.
• Information can be dated because these are published once and not always upated.

Journal articles are the published findings of academic studies.

• Many are peer-reviewed, which is an additional check of credibility before the article is published.
• They are very specific and typically only report on one study, so you may need to find several to show what research is being done on you specific species.
• Journals are published multiple times a year, so there is plenty of opportunity to find more recent studies on your species.
• The library page “Understanding Journals” gives more information about what journals are and are not.

Search for information in the following sources if you did not find enough back ground information on the IUCN Red List or the Fish and Wildlife Service website. These sources are not specific to endangered species.

Search Suggestions

• Find the animal’s scientific name; many researchers may refer to it by that instead of its common name.
• “Re-search” means to search again, so you will probably have to do multiple searches across multiple resources.
• Journal articles often report original research and will focus on one experiment or field study.
• When searching for journal or magazine articles, combine your species' name with and aspect of your project like habitat or diet; you can also search for a reason it might be endangered: farming, industrialization, climate change, etc.
• These article may be more up to date than the IUCN report and will go into more detail.
• If you saw an article in the reference list on the IUCN Red List or the ADW, use QuickSearch to search for it by its title, we might have access to it.