Science
December 19, 2020 Once in grave danger of being wiped out, the bison’s threat status was recently downgraded from ‘vulnerable’ to extinction to ‘nearly threatened’. Michał Zieliński/PAP
A native of Poland’s primeval forests, the European bison has made a strong comeback thanks to an effective conservation program that has seen the continent’s largest land mammal rescued from the brink of imminent extinction.
Once in grave danger of being wiped out, the bison’s threat status was recently downgraded from ‘vulnerable’ to extinction to ‘nearly threatened’; meanwhile, its population status was reclassified as ‘increasing’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an organization that issues the Red List of Threatened Species, the world’s most important source of information regarding the global extinction risk of