The Role of Published Information in Reviewing Conservation Objectives for Natura 2000 Protected Areas in the European Union

Abstract

Protected areas are designated to protect species and other features known to be present at the time of designation, but over time the information about the presence of protected species may change and this should call for a continued review of conservation objectives. Published scientific literature is one of the possible information sources that would trigger a review of conservation objectives. We studied how published data on new discoveries of protected animal species were taken into account by the nature conservation authorities in updating species lists of Natura 2000 sites in the European Union, which are the basis for conservation planning at the site-level. Over the period studied (2000-2011) only 40% of published new protected species records were recognized by the authorities. The two main reasons for this seem to be a reliance on other sources of information by authorities and the difficulty in finding relevant information in scientific papers. The latter is because published faunistic information is very fragmented among different journals, and often insufficient in details. We recommend better cooperation between authors, publishers, and nature conservation authorities in terms of information presentation, publishing policy, and a regular review of published information.