Audience charts are tools that help you think about who will read your document and the decisions they will make based upon it. This chart outlines the audiences that read SSA Reports before and after a listing decision is made. Use it as a starting point for your SSA, and modify it to accommodate your unique context. As you do so, think about the various political interests, resource managers, and community members who interact with the at-risk species. Doing so will help you include the right amount of context to describe the species taxonomy, current and historical conditions, factors affecting its viability, and future scenarios.

SSA Reports follow a standard outline:

Introduction

Species Ecology

Current Condition

Factors Affecting Viability

Future Scenarios

However, within that framework, the report allows for tremendous variability given the unique context of our many species. Your report will look different based on many factors, such as the number of species included in the analysis, whether the species are flora or fauna, the number of threats affecting the species, and the variety of future scenarios we envision.

A detailed outline can help you stay on track and work more efficiently. We hope this guidance helps.

A series of checklists to keep you on track as you compose each section of your SSA Report. These are also useful for reviewing and commenting on SSA Reports written by others.

Many factors can affect a species viability. These factors can also work individually or in concert, and one challenge for SSA Report writers is to communicate the cumulative and correlational relationships among these factors. The strategies presented here are intended to help you think about how to organize this discussion.

All future predictions are uncertain; therefore, scientists qualify them using terms such as "highly likely," "likely," or "unlikely." In the context of an SSA Report, these terms should be defined. Your region may have standard definitions for these terms, which should be reproduced in your SSA Report. 

Another alternative is to adopt terminology specified by The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their report on climate change.

This guidance offers several tables, with descriptions and instructions, about how to define uncertainty consistently throughout your SSA Report.

As you communicate complex scientific concepts, we encourage you to use maps, tables, and figures. Nevertheless, such visual aids must be described and interpreted. Here, we offer some guidance about how to do so.

In all scientific documents, factual information must be cited. However, our interpretation of the facts, also known as analysis, may or may not require a citation.

Citations serve to protect intellectual property and thus encourage discovery and innovation. They also demonstrate our commitment to following