A bottom–up approach for the conservation status assessment of structure and functions of habitat types

Plant communities and habitat types in the protected area of Lake Pamvotis (Epirus, Northwestern Greece)

“…EUNIS: EUNIS Habitat Classification (Davies et al, 2004;Schaminée et al, 2019) Davies et al (2004), Schaminée et al (2019), and the Interpretation Manual of EU Habitat types (Anon., 2013), whereas habitat types of national interest follow Dafis et al (2001). For the assessment of habitat types' conservation status, both European (Evans & Arvela, 2011) and national guidelines (Kotzageorgis et al, 2014;Tsiripidis et al, 2018) have been considered, as proposed by Evans & Arvela (2011) and adopted for Greece (Chrysopolitou et al, 2014), at a local or regional scale (e.g., sampling plot level or Natura 2000 site level). The term conservation degree should be used for the conservation status assessment, while at national or biogeographical scale the term conservation status.…”

“…The term conservation degree should be used for the conservation status assessment, while at national or biogeographical scale the term conservation status. This differentiation is essential (Kokkoris et al, 2018;Tsiripidis et al, 2018) and in the current work, the term conservation degree is used both for the assessment of habitat conservation status at the sample plot level (relevés) and for the overall assessment in the Natura 2000 site and the study area. The methodology used follows the procedure developed within the national monitoring project of habitat types for the standardization of the conservation status assessment methods (Dimopoulos et al, 2018;Tsiripidis et al, 2018).…”

“…This differentiation is essential (Kokkoris et al, 2018;Tsiripidis et al, 2018) and in the current work, the term conservation degree is used both for the assessment of habitat conservation status at the sample plot level (relevés) and for the overall assessment in the Natura 2000 site and the study area. The methodology used follows the procedure developed within the national monitoring project of habitat types for the standardization of the conservation status assessment methods (Dimopoulos et al, 2018;Tsiripidis et al, 2018). In brief, assessment of the conservation degree of each habitat type started at the plot level, with a minimum number of 5 relevés per habitat type, unless this was not possible due to limited habitat size.…”

“…For each habitat type, different field sheets prepared for the national monitoring project have been used (Dimopoulos et al, 2018). These field sheets include specific variables-criteria for the assessment of conservation status of each habitat type such as structure and functions (including typical species), assessment of trend and future status of the habitats' structures and functions based on observed pressures and threats alongside their intensity, as well as the presence of positive impacts (Kallimanis et al, 2017;Tsiripidis et al, 2018).…”

“…These data were used to classify the vegetation units and to identify the habitat types, since the recently proposed revisions of the EUNIS (European Nature Information System) habitat classification system are mainly based on a combination of species occurrence and species cover (Schaminée et al, 2019). In addition, data regarding the sampling locality of each plot was recorded as proposed by Tsiripidis et al (2018).…”