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 Conservation Designations
Spreadsheet (4.34 MB)
File name: Taxon_designations_20091123.zip
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 (45.6 MB) and will take
approximately 100 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
In response to user feedback, a major update to the
spreadsheet was carried out in August 2009. This included updates
to existing categories including the Birds of
Conservation Concern List, the Global IUCN Red List and the
Vascular Plant Red Data List for Great Britain, and the addition of
new categories to the spreadsheet, for example,
the Conservation (Natural Habitats, &c.) Regulations
1994 and the Biodiversity Lists (NERC section 41 and 42, and
Scottish Biodiversity List). A full
list of updates carried out since the Conservation Designations
spreadsheet was first published is available to
view.
We do not claim that these lists are fully comprehensive,
for example it does not incorporate all of the marine species
"badges" or all Schedules in the Wildlife and Countryside Act.
More content will be added in future updates. 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.