Is legal protection sufficient to ensure plant conservation? The Italian Red List of policy species as a case study

Abstract

The conservation of species listed in the Bern Convention and European Directive 1992/43/EEC (so-called policy species) is mandatory for European Union (EU) countries. We assessed the conservation status of Italian policy species, based on the IUCN categories and criteria, to evaluate the effectiveness of existing protection measures at the national level. Among the 203 vascular plants, bryophytes and lichens evaluated, 41.9% are categorized as threatened, and one is already extinct, indicating that the protection measures for policy species are inadequate. Our results for the Italian policy species are consistent with those of an assessment at the EU level. Conservation priorities should be established at both the national and regional scales. An effective conservation strategy is needed, and in situ and ex situ actions focused on threatened species should be promoted

IUCN guidelines using for assessment of plants from the Red Book of Russian Federation at regional level: a case study for the Republic of Mordovia (Russia)

“…et al 2015, Rossi et al 2015, Stroh et al 2014, Moreno Saiz et al 2015. Grid mapping has little value for mapping the distributions of Russian plant taxa.…”

An updated checklist of the vascular flora native to Italy

“…This also served as a basis for an inventory of endemic taxa of Italy (Peruzzi et al 2014a(Peruzzi et al , 2015a, for the project "Italian Loci Classici Census" (Domina et al 2012;Passalacqua et al 2014;Peruzzi et al 2015b;Brundu et al 2017), for the revised Red List of Italian vascular plants (Rossi et al 2013(Rossi et al , 2014(Rossi et al , 2016 and for the updated checklist of the Italian plants listed in the Habitat Directive (Fenu et al 2017).…”

At the intersection of cultural and natural heritage: Distribution and conservation of the type localities of Italian endemic vascular plants

“…Among the 263 records for narrow endemics, 86 fall in the geographic accuracy class 4, and 177 fall in class 5. Narrow endemics were delimited and identified according to all the available literature (e.g., Catoni and Gratani, 2013;Foggi et al, 2015;Mattana et al, 2010;Rossi et al, 2016), which was reviewed by expert opinion for the purposes of the present analysis. In the case of multiple locations for the same narrow endemic taxon, we verified that the difference in latitude and longitude was on average below 0.10 × 0.10 degrees and therefore approximately within a maximum distance of 10 km to be consistent with the operational definition used in the present analysis.…”