Abstract
The Red List of threatened habitat types in Germany was first published in 1994 and it is updated approximately every ten years. In 2017 the third version was published by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation. In the course of the revision, the criteria system was also extended. In doing so, an attempt was made to find a compromise between the consideration of international developments that had taken place and existing national requirements. In particular, short-term developments should become visible through the German Red List status. In addition to ‘National long-term Threat’, the valuation now also includes ‘Current Trend’ and ‘Rarity’. Following the IUCN’s approach, the collapse risk is now represented on the basis of several criteria. However, in contrast to the IUCN procedure, where the worst evaluated criterion is determinative for Red List status, in our procedure all criteria are included in the evaluation. To counteract misleading signal-effects for management decisions, all significant criteria have an influence on the resulting German Red List status (RLG). They are combined in an assessment scheme. In order to map the overall risk of loss, both the long-term threat as a historical reference value and furthermore the current trend must have an influence on RLG. As a result, 65% of habitat types have differing risk of loss.
Highlights
The protection of biotopes, which aims to preserve a habitat and its complete biocenosis, has become a core instrument of nature conservation in Europe since the 1970s (e.g. Erz 1971; Blab 1984; Kaule 1986; Blab et al 1993, 1995; Riecken et al 1994; Essl et al 2002)
The following main considerations were taken into account: (1) the new criteria and categories should clearly relate to those used in previous editions and thereby allow for comparisons to earlier editions (Riecken et al 1994, 2006); (2) as far as they are relevant for habitats, existing updated national standards for Red List assessments of species (Ludwig et al 2009) should be considered; (3) and, as many aspects as possible should be taken into consideration from both the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concept (Keith et al 2013; Bland et al 2017) and the approaches currently used for the European Red List of Habitats (Gubbay et al 2016; Janssen et al 2016)
The objective of this paper is to present the recently revised assessment procedure for habitat types in Germany and to contribute to further discussion of an appropriate method for Red List assessment for habitats
Summary
The protection of biotopes, which aims to preserve a habitat and its complete biocenosis, has become a core instrument of nature conservation in Europe since the 1970s (e.g. Erz 1971; Blab 1984; Kaule 1986; Blab et al 1993, 1995; Riecken et al 1994; Essl et al 2002). The following main considerations were taken into account: (1) the new criteria and categories should clearly relate to those used in previous editions and thereby allow for comparisons to earlier editions (Riecken et al 1994, 2006); (2) as far as they are relevant for habitats, existing updated national standards for Red List assessments of species (Ludwig et al 2009) should be considered (e.g. assessment scheme, consideration of different time frames, and specific risk factors like rarity); (3) and, as many aspects as possible should be taken into consideration from both the IUCN concept (Keith et al 2013; Bland et al 2017) and the approaches currently used for the European Red List of Habitats (Gubbay et al 2016; Janssen et al 2016). Verbal descriptive categories can be useful for countries for which complete quantitative information on the occurrence of habitats is not available
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