Every species the Endangered Species Act has ever listed, delisted or reclassified — pulled from the two agencies' own live records, crossed against four years of the spending reports Congress is sent, and the number of whales it is legal to kill.
The Endangered Species Act became law on December 28, 1973, the culmination of a decade of growing alarm about species disappearing faster than anyone could count them. It does one specific thing: it lets two federal agencies — the Fish and Wildlife Service for everything on land and in fresh water, NOAA Fisheries for everything in the ocean and migrating through it — add a species, subspecies or distinct population to a legal list, after which harming it, trading it or destroying the habitat it depends on becomes a federal offense.
This page is that list, kept current against the government's own database rather than a news summary of it. It is not built to alarm. Most of what follows is procedural: paperwork, dates, review cycles, and the occasional very large number. The interesting part is what the paperwork itself reveals once you can see all of it at once — including that "removed from the list" is not the same thing as "recovered," that the most-listed group of organisms in the country is not an animal at all, and that one species has been legally endangered, threatened, experimental and delisted-as-recovered at the same time, in different states.
Every bar is a calendar year; its height is how many of today's 2,619 tracked listing entities — entries in the Fish and Wildlife Service's Endangered Species database, current and historical — were first listed that year, whether or not they are still on the list today. The tallest years are not evenly spaced: a single day, June 2, 1970, added 248 species at once — almost entirely foreign mammals, birds and reptiles listed under the Act's 1969 predecessor law — and another single day, June 14, 1976, added 147 more. Those two dates alone outweigh most individual decades of one-at-a-time review that followed.
The law recognizes two core categories — endangered (in danger of extinction now) and threatened (likely to become endangered) — plus two narrower legal constructions: an experimental population released into new territory under relaxed rules to encourage recovery attempts, and a similarity-of-appearance listing, for a species that isn't actually at risk but is protected because it's easily mistaken for one that is.
A species leaves the list for one of three reasons, and the government's own bookkeeping treats all three as the same event: delisted. Only one of those reasons is the good news the word implies.
Of the — delisting entities on record, — were removed because they actually recovered — the bald eagle (2007), the Louisiana black bear (2016), the Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf (2017) among them. — were removed because they went extinct first. The rest were never really eligible in the first place: a taxonomic reclassification decided the "species" was actually a hybrid or a duplicate of something else already covered, or new information overturned the original listing decision. Reading a falling delisting count as an environmental success story, without checking which bucket each one fell into, is the trap this page is built to avoid.
A species can also be reclassified without leaving the list at all — downlisted from endangered to the less severe threatened as it recovers, or uplisted the other way as its situation worsens. Below are the — reclassification events this build could match to a specific listing entity and date.
The Fish and Wildlife Service leads on almost everything — mammals, birds, plants, insects, freshwater fish. NOAA Fisheries takes over the moment a species' life happens mostly in salt water: whales, most sea turtles, Pacific salmon runs, reef-building corals, the big migratory sharks. A small number are split between both agencies at once, usually because the species crosses that line itself — a sea turtle that nests on a beach and swims across an ocean.
The Act's reach isn't limited to U.S. soil. It covers foreign species traded across U.S. borders, and highly migratory ocean animals that spend only part of their range in U.S. waters. A sample, pulled live from the same data as everything else on this page:
Section 18 of the Act obliges the Fish and Wildlife Service to tell Congress, every year, what every federal agency and every state actually spent on every listed species. The reports are published as PDFs with no machine-readable release; the four most recent — fiscal years 2019 through 2022, the last of them published in May 2026 — were parsed for this page and reconcile to the dollar against the totals the reports print themselves.
They show something the listing counts hide completely. NOAA Fisheries leads — of the listing entities on the whole list. It accounts for — of the money.
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Every entity the report ranks, largest first. Bars in green are the ones NOAA Fisheries leads. The Columbia and Snake river salmon and steelhead runs at the top are not expensive because they are especially endangered — they are expensive because recovering them means operating, and sometimes not operating, a hydroelectric system.
Figures are total identifiable federal plus state expenditures reported for that fiscal year, excluding land acquisition and multi-species work the report cannot attribute to one entity. They are what agencies reported, not an audit.
Everything above this point comes from the Fish and Wildlife Service's database, including its opinion of which species NOAA Fisheries leads. NOAA keeps its own list, and publishes it as JSON. It contains — species broken into — separately listed entities, and it carries three things FWS's export has no column for at all: which NOAA region leads the species, whether a recovery plan exists yet, and whether critical habitat was designated, refused, or never attempted.
The Act requires a recovery plan for every listed species unless one would not promote conservation. These are NOAA's own status labels for its own entities.
“Not prudent” is a real finding an agency can make — usually where publishing a map would tell collectors exactly where to go.
Joining NOAA's list to FWS's turns out to be a data problem rather than a lookup. The two agencies do not use the same scientific names for the same animals, and neither one flags the difference.
NatureServe ranks a species across its entire global range, from G1 (critically imperilled) to G5 (demonstrably secure). Running every NOAA-managed species through that scale exposes what the ESA is actually for: it does not list species, it lists populations. A salmon species can be abundant across the Pacific Rim and functionally extinct in one river system, and the second fact is the one the Act responds to.
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NOAA's whole list, with its own recovery and habitat status, its global rank, the number of Federal Register documents that name it, and what was spent on it in the most recent reported fiscal year. Sort by any column.
| Species | Group | Region | Listed units | Recovery plan | Global rank | FR docs | FY22 spend |
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For marine mammals, a second law runs alongside the ESA and produces a number the ESA never does. The Marine Mammal Protection Act makes NOAA publish, for every stock in US waters, a Potential Biological Removal level: how many animals a year people can kill — nets, ship strikes, gunshots, entanglement — while still letting the stock reach and hold its optimum size. Alongside it the same report prints the observed human-caused deaths. Two numbers, same page, directly comparable.
Of the — Atlantic and Gulf stocks where NOAA publishes both figures, — are being killed faster than NOAA itself says is sustainable.
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Every listing, delisting, critical habitat designation, permit and finding has to be published in the Federal Register, which has a proper documented API. Asking it for everything either agency has filed under “Endangered and Threatened” gives a second, independent view of the same law — and the two agencies turn out to do visibly different jobs under it.
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Pulled at build time; each links to the document itself.
A species with a range spanning ten states is counted in all ten — this map shows overlap, not a partition of the country. Hawaiʻi and Puerto Rico, disproportionately high, are why: island endemics evolved nowhere else, with nowhere else to retreat to.
Beyond protecting the animal or plant itself, the Fish and Wildlife Service can designate critical habitat — specific mapped land or water the species needs to recover, where federal agencies must avoid destroying it. — such designations are on record for species tracked on this page. Ranked by acreage, a few dwarf the rest:
Acreage above is parsed from each designation's own recorded measurement text and is not itself a sum of unique acres — overlapping designations for the same range are not deduplicated.
The Act requires FWS and NOAA Fisheries to formally revisit every listed species at least once every five years and ask whether its status still fits the evidence. — completed reviews are on record. The honest headline: — of them concluded "no change in status" — the review process mostly confirms what was already known, not a steady drumbeat of upgrades and downgrades.
Search by common or scientific name, or filter by group, status, managing agency, range, or the decade it was first listed. Click any row to open its full history — delisting and reclassification dates, five-year reviews, critical habitat designations and recovery plans, each linking to the government's own document.
| Common name | Scientific name | Group | Status | Agency | Listed |
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Every number on this page comes from live queries against the Fish and Wildlife Service's ECOSphere reporting API (ecos.fws.gov), fetched fresh at build time — not a static export someone else cleaned first. The endpoints are undocumented; they were found by watching the network traffic of FWS's own public report pages and are as likely to break as any unversioned government API. The fetch and merge scripts are in this project's src/ folder.
A few specific traps, found the hard way while building this:
The Endangered Species Act's own text and every Federal Register notice cited here are public record. Data pulled from FWS ECOS and NOAA Fisheries is a work of the United States Government and carries no copyright restriction in the U.S.