Assessment of the threat status of the European vascular flora

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is the world’s most comprehensive source of information on the global conservation status of animal, fungi and plant species and is an important indicator of the state of the world’s biodiversity. In order to assess the extinction risk of species and publish Red Lists for a specific region, guidelines have been developed to assist in the application of the IUCN Red List categories and criteria at the regional level. The IUCN Red List categories and criteria at the regional level have been used to develop Red Lists at the national level. Red List data is often used to guide natural resource management at different levels, in national development policy and legislation, and can make an important contribution to the development of multilateral agreements. In the context of Working Group 3 - Filling the Gaps in Plant Conservation, we have used the national Red Lists to assess the overall conservation status of the European vascular flora. To obtain a detailed overview of the current status of national Red Lists of vascular plants in Europe, we compiled data from the latest national Red Lists of vascular plants of European countries as well as some countries from the eastern part of the Mediterranean biodiversity hotspot. We harmonized the taxonomic names via a nomenclature backbone and the categories into unique values. We converted the values from categorical to numerical values as suggested in a recent article. We combined our data for each country with the overall distribution and calculated an average value to obtain a list of the most threatened plant species in Europe. As explained in a recent article, the most threatened species are single country endemics. Here we present partial results of our work, which will be elaborated and presented in a scientific paper.

Download the List of taxa with overall geographic location and average threat score (upper quartile).

Download the List of taxa, ordered based on the number of total geographic locations. 

Download the List of taxa present in more than one geographic location, with average threat score.