How many endangered species are there?

Question

How many endangered species are there?

Answer 1

That depends: Are you speaking of endangered animals, endangered plants, or all endangered species? Secondly, are you referring to officially listed animals, or estimates based on evidence that is inconclusive at this point?

A good place to start would be the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Threatened and Endangered Species System (TESS) at http://ecos.fws.gov/tess_public/StartTES... This site breaks it all down by many different criteria and lists the number of records for each category.

Just from what I saw, there are well more than 2500 different listed endangered species (plant and animal combined). Don't forget, new species are being found all the time, so one can only guess about the status of species we know nothing about