Abstract
Setting aside protected areas is widely recognized as one of the most effective measures to prevent species from extinction. Accordingly, there has been a tremendous effort by governments worldwide to establish protected areas, resulting in over 100,000 sites, which are set aside, to achieve the 10% target proposed at the Fourth World Park Congress in 1992 in Caracas. The main effort of the European Union to achieve this target is the Natura 2000 network of protected areas, comprising over 25,000 sites representing 18% of the area of the 27 Member States of the European Union. The designation of Natura 2000 sites was based on species and habitats listed in the Annexes of the Habitats and Birds Directive. The effectiveness of the selection process and the resulting Natura 2000 network has often been questioned as each country made its designations largely independently and in most cases without considering the theories of optimal Nature Conservation 3: 45–63 (2012) doi: 10.3897/natureconservation.3.3732 http://www.pensoft.net/natureconservation Copyright Bernd Gruber et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC-BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. REsEARCH ARtiClE Launched to accelerate biodiversity conservation A peer-reviewed open-access journal
Highlights
Systematic approaches in planning reserve networks have been intensively developed to guide efficient reserve site selection (Brooks et al 2006; Drechsler 2005; Margules and Pressey 2000; Margules and Sarkar 2007; Moilanen and Wintle 2006; Myers et al 2000; Trakhtenbrot and Kadmon 2006)
We argue that the representation of Annex II species and the derived representation index REX can be used to identify gaps in the Natura 2000 network and to guide future conservation effort
Our evaluation of the Natura 2000 reserve network demonstrates that the site selection process succeeded in avoiding gap species but was inefficient as many species are underrepresented relative to expectation based on their range size
Summary
Systematic approaches in planning reserve networks have been intensively developed to guide efficient reserve site selection (Brooks et al 2006; Drechsler 2005; Margules and Pressey 2000; Margules and Sarkar 2007; Moilanen and Wintle 2006; Myers et al 2000; Trakhtenbrot and Kadmon 2006). The main common strategy has been to designate conservation areas for species listed as threatened – so called “Red List species” (Rodrigues et al 2004a). This encompasses designating those conservation areas where a species occurs, regardless of protection effort in other countries. This strategy is generally sufficient to achieve a single representation of each species (but see Rodrigues et al 2004b), it leads to a biased representation of many species. In countries of the European Union, a huge effort has been undertaken in recent years to establish and enhance the European Network of protected sites (known as Natura 2000) by designating areas to protect species and habitats listed in the corresponding Annexes of the Habitats Directive and Birds Directive (European Commission 2006)
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