Europes ecological backbone.pdf

Biodiversity
Figure 8.1 Number of mountain habitat types in individual groups of habitats
Number of types
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1. Coastal and
halophytic
habitats
2. Coastal
sand dunes
and
inland
dunes
3. Freshwater
habitats
4. Temperate
heath and
scrub
5. Schlerphyllous
scrub
(matorral)
6. Natural
and seminatural
grassland
formations
7. Raised bogs
and mires
and fens
8. Rocky
habitats
and caves
9. Forest
Mountain Both mountain and non-mountain Non-mountain
thickets). Third, at the level of habitat types, in
addition to the two forest habitat types mentioned
above and screes, the majority of natural grassland
habitat types are found only in mountains. Two
of these are widespread (alpine and sub-alpine
calcareous grasslands; siliceous alpine and boreal
grasslands) and others are more restricted: siliceous
Pyrenean Festuca eskia grasslands; Oro-Iberian
Festuca indigesta grasslands (Iberian mountains);
and Macaronesian mesophile grasslands.
8.1.3 Status of habitats
As part of the reporting process under Article 17
of the Habitats Directive, Member States have to
report on the conservation status of habitats listed
in Annex I of the Directive. A common assessment
method has been developed for this purpose (EC,
2005). The outcomes of this method are assessments
as to whether the status of a habitat is favourable,
unfavourable–inadequate, unfavourable–bad, or
unknown. It should be noted that, for the EU as a
whole, 13 % of habitat assessments were reported
by Member States as unknown, particularly for
the countries of southern Europe (EC, 2009). The
data used for the analysis below are at a resolution
of 10 km x 10 km; the value for each grid cell
expresses the occurrence of the habitat within
that cell. Using these data, the quantification
of values for conservation status followed the
method of the European Topic Centre on Biological
Diversity (2008) to identify habitats, in sequence,
as: 'Unfavourable — bad' (U2); 'Favourable'
(FV); 'Unknown' (XX); or 'Unfavourable —
inadequate (U1).
Table 8.6 presents the numbers of habitat types in
each massif classified according to these criteria,
and Figure 8.2 presents these data as proportions.
Overall, 21 % of habitats are assessed as being
in favourable status, 28 % are in unfavourable–
inadequate status, 32 % are in unfavourable–bad
status, and 18 % are unknown. As noted previously,
the majority of the latter are in Spain (Iberian
mountains, Pyrenees); since the status of 90 %
of the habitat types in the Iberian mountains is
unknown, this massif is not discussed further here.
In Figure 8.2, the massifs are ordered from left to
right in terms of the proportion of habitat types in
favourable status. Within this category, proportions
range from 56 % in the Apennines to almost 0 % in
the mountains of the British Isles. There is no clear
geographical pattern to these findings. While the
proportions of habitat types in favourable status
shown in Figure 8.2 may appear low, it should be
recognised that one of the criteria for being listed
on Annex I was threat or historical decline, so
that it would be expected that most habitats and
species would to be in an unfavourable status;
these results also need to be seen in the national
context. As shown in Figure 8.3, in most countries,
the proportion of habitat types in favourable status
is higher within mountains than outside them,
sometime by a very significant margin in countries
with large mountain areas (for example, Austria,
Greece, Italy) and those with small mountain areas
(for example, Finland, Sweden, Poland). The only
countries for which this trend does not hold true
are in the British Isles: Ireland and the United
Kingdom.
148 Europe's ecological backbone: recognising the true value of our mountains