Endangered Classification of West African Lions
The lion species (Panthera leo) is classified as Vulnerable in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, but recent surveys have shown that the lions of West Africa are in serious decline, and so they have now been classified as Endangered in the Red List. 
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The Red List Explained

The IUCN Red List is the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant and animal species. It uses a set of criteria to evaluate the extinction risk of thousands of species and subspecies. These criteria are relevant to all species and all regions of the world. With its strong scientific base, the IUCN  Red List is recognized as the most authoritative guide to the status of biological diversity.
The overall aim of the Red List is to convey the urgency and scale of conservation problems to the public and policy makers, and to motivate the global community to try to reduce species extinctions.
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Revision of the Felidae Red List of Threatened Species

The original system of evaluating species status, in use up to 1994, classified species as Extinct, Endangered, Vulnerable, Rare, Indeterminate or Insufficiently Known. These category definitions were largely subjective; for example, the definition of Endangered in 1993 was: “Taxa in danger of extinction and whose survival is unlikely if the causal factors continue operating” (Groombridge 1993). By the 1980s it was becoming evident that a more objective and quantitative method of comparing species extinction risk was needed.
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