Conservation Designations for UK Taxa
Over the past thirty years, numerous lists of conservation
status have been produced - Red Lists, Biodiversity Action Plan
Priority Lists, species listed on European Directives, species
listed on the Schedules of the Wildlife & Countryside Act,
together with lists of rare and scarce species. There is
considerable overlap between these and some species appear on
several of them - for example the otter Lutra lutra, and
the marsh saxifrage Saxifraga hirculus have as many as six
“badges". JNCC has attempted to collate many of the current lists
into one place and make this available to users as a downloadable
spreadsheet of species designations.
Find out about the background to the
spreadsheet.
Download the spreadsheet
Download latest version of the spreadsheet of conservation
designations for UK taxa.
File name: Taxon_designations_20081029.zip (2.3 mb)
NB: the date last updated is included in the file title (eg
20050830 = 30/8/2005 and the file is zipped to facilitate
downloading. See details of the updating process to discover how this
spreadsheet differs from previous versions.
If you are not able to download or decompress ZIP archives
successfully you may wish to download the uncompressed version of
the conservation designations for UK taxa, but note this
file is very large (15.7 mb) and will take approximately 35
minutes to download on a 56 kbps modem.
Spreadsheet contents and guidance for use
The spread sheet contains over 8000 “taxa" that have been
assigned some form of rarity, threat or legal status in Great
Britain or the UK. (Note that we refer to "taxa" rather than
"species" in this context because many of the entities on the list
are sub-species, i.e. conservation priority action has been
identified for a given sub-species but not the species as a whole.)
The spreadsheet can be searched to find which designations a
particular taxon has, or to find out which UK taxa are listed for a
given designation.
The spreadsheet contains several worksheets – the most important
being the "Master list". In effect the Master list is really a
collation of different lists combined into the same data structure,
with each row being distinguished by a unique combination of "taxa"
and designation. Thus a taxon with 10 designations will be
represented by ten rows on the master list.
At a broad level the Master list comprises three categories of
lists:
For a full explanation of what the spreadsheet contains and how
best to use it please look at the spreadsheet guidance.
Latest Updates:
Although this list has been available from the JNCC website for
more than a year, we have recently made several amendments to it to
correct previous errors and to make it more user friendly. The
content has also been updated for lichens, mosses and liverworts,
and we have used this format to formally update the previously
published Red Data List for Vascular Plants.
We do not claim that these lists are fully comprehensive, for
example it does not incorporate all of the marine species "badges"
or the recently published list of Scottish species. It does not
include lists of species that are still being finalised e.g. UK red
lists awaiting publication. We intend to update this list at
least annually. Please let us know if you find any
errors, or if you would like to see any other lists added to the
compilation.
Find
out more about the updating process.