European Red List of Vascular Plants - European Commission

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■■ Raise the profile of CWR as they are often overlooked as an element of biodiversity, ensuring that they are systematically conserved and that the conserved germplasm is made available to the user stakeholder community. 7.2 Application of project outputs This European Red List of Vascular Plants is part of a wider project aimed at comprehensively assessing several taxonomic groups (mammals, amphibians, reptiles, freshwater fish, freshwater molluscs, dragonflies, butterflies), and selected beetles and terrestrial molluscs. In conjunction with the data on European birds published by BirdLife International (BirdLife International 2004a,b), the European Red List of Vascular Plants provides key resources for decision-makers, policymakers, resources managers, environmental planners and NGOs. It has gathered large amounts of data on the population, ecology, habitats, threats and recommended conservation measures for each species assessed. These data are freely available on the IUCN Red List website (www. iucnredlist.org), on the European Commission website (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/conservation/ species/redlist) and through paper publications (see the list of European Red Lists published at the end of this report). This Red List is a dynamic tool that will evolve with time as species are reassessed according to new information or situations. It is aimed at stimulating and supporting research, monitoring and conservation action at local, regional and international levels, especially for threatened, Near Threatened and Data Deficient species. Each species assessment lists the major threats affecting the specific plant as well as conservation measures in place or needed. This will be useful to inform the application of conservation measures for each species. The outputs of this project can be applied to inform policy, to identify priority sites and species to include in research and monitoring programmes and to identify internationally important areas for biodiversity. It also contributes to broaden the coverage of plants on the global IUCN Red List as many species assessed during this project are endemic to the European region. 7.3 Future work As this European Red List of Vascular Plants covers only about 8% of Europe’s flora, we are only at the starting point of understanding the threat status of European plants. With potentially at least 18,000 more species to be assessed, careful planning is needed to prioritise further groups of plants. There are several possibilities to increase the coverage of the European Red List. One would be to continue identifiying groups of special interest such as medicinal plants due to their importance for human survival and potential overexploitation. Or grassland species as overgrazing and the lack of grazing have already been identfied as major threats to other plant species and because a loss of traditional land use and agricultural intensification can be observed throughout Europe. Plant species restricted to mountains might also be of interest, as they are likely to be particularly affected by climate change in the near future. Another strategy would be to pre-identify potentially threatened species and carry out full Red List assessments of those. The list of threatened European plants compiled by BGCI (Sharrock and Jones 2009), identified 1,917 priority taxa and should be compared with the list of species in this project. Assessing those species would be an excellent addition to the current Red List as it would ensure that the most threatened species are included and the additional documentation required for a red list assessment could improve the application of adequate conservation measures for those species. Another option is the RapidList Tool which could be applied to all known plant species that have not been assessed and help identify which ones are potentially threatened and would require a full Red List assessment. There is a need to extend the application of the Red List Categories and Criteria to a greater number of CWR species in Europe as well as ephemeral wetland species and to re-evaluate the species assessed as Data Deficient in this study. It will be difficult to identify the ideal way forward which will also be determined by available financial resources and donor interest. But funding is the key to get an overview of the state of Europe’s flora and to fulfil Target 2 of the European Strategy for Plant Conservation (Planta Europa 2008). Through the process of gathering and compiling plant data across Europe, several knowledge gaps have been identified. There are in particular significant geographical and taxonomical biases in the quality and quantity of data available on the distribution and status of species. The importance of intra-specific genetic diversity has been stressed in this report but the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria currently have a limited application regarding the assessment of threat to genetic diversity. One possibility would be the assessment of distinct 54
subpopulations, something that has been practised for various animal species. Means of taking into account genetic diversity in the assessment process should be explored and developed, either to complement or extend the applicability of the existing system. Future work should focus on strengthening the plant expert network at European level. Ressources for workshops, training, and meetings will be needed which will be beneficial in the long-term goal of conserving plant diversity. If the plant assessments are periodically updated, they will enable the changing status of these species to be tracked through time via the production of a Red List Index (Butchart et al. 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007). To date, this indicator has been produced for birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles at the European regional level and has been adopted as one of the headline biodiversity indicators to monitor progress towards halting biodiversity loss in Europe by 2020 (European Environment Agency 2007). By regularly updating the data presented here we will be able to track the changing fate of European plants to 2020 and beyond. Argyranthemum winteri, listed in Annex II of the Habitats Directive, is restricted to the Jandia Peninsula in the south of Fuerteventura. It is found at three locations only which occupy not more than 4 km 2 . It is listed as Critically Endangered. Photograph © Stephan Scholz. 55
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European Red List of Vascular Plant
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Published by the European Commissio
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6. Discussion .....................
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Acknowledgements All of IUCN’s Re
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Andrés Vicente Pérez Latorre Lore
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are declining. But more interesting
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a global “biodiversity hotspot”
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Page 18 and 19: level, and species complexes have b
Page 20 and 21: Convention includes 612 European pl
Page 22 and 23: 3.2 Threat status of policy plants
Page 24 and 25: Figure 5. Species richness of polic
Page 26 and 27: Figure 7. Distribution of threatene
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Page 34 and 35: ecause they are wild relatives of a
Page 36 and 37: Table 6. Threatened and extinct CWR
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Page 68 and 69: References Anderson, S. 2002. Ident
Page 70 and 71: IPCC. 2007. Fourth Assessment Repor
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Family Species IUCN Red List Catego
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Appendix 3. Methodology for spatial
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European Commission European Red Li
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