The 2011 Red List of Italian breeding birds

Abstract

The purpose of Red Lists is to assess the short-term risk of extinction in a given taxon, and they are drafted according to guidelines produced by the IUCN. The guidelines make it possible to draft both global and regional or sub-global lists, keeping in mind the relationship between the populations being assessed and neighbouring populations. The present work results from the application of this methodology. It aims to update the previous Red List of breeding birds in Italy and to bridge the methodological and temporal gap that for many years has prevented Italy from availing itself of an important tool for bird conservation and planning. We considered a totol of 270 specie: 51.1% were classified as Least Concern (LC),9.6% as Near-Threatened (NT), while 27.3% are in one of the three threatened categories: 2.2% Critically Endangered (CR), 8.1% Endangered (EN) and 17% Vulnerable (VU). The data for 3.3% of the species assessed was not sufficient to assign them to a threat category, and they were thus classified as Data Deficient (DD). Finally, three species that were classified as Regionally Extinct (RE) in the previous Red List of Breeding Birds in Italy were confirmed as such. A total of six species were classified as Critically Endangered (CR), of which four are raptors (Lammergeier, Egyptian Vulture, Griffon Vulture, Bonelli’s Eagle) and two are passerines (Sedge Warbler, Barred Warbler). At the level of orders, Anseriformes is the taxon with the highest percentage of threatened or near-threatened species (55.6%), followed by Gruiformes (54.6%) and Accipitriformes (53.8%). Unfortunately it was not possible to effectively compare the current Red List with the previous one, as there are significant methodological differences between them. The current work follows IUCN guidelines for regional red lists, which had not yet been drafted when the previous Red List of Breeding Birds in Italy was prepared. Nevertheless, it clearly emerges that the number of threatened passerines increased from 21.7% to 31%. This finding may in part depend on improved knowledge about population trends in widespread species, or it may truly reflect the worsening of the conservation status of many passerine species over the last decade. Current knowledge on breeding birds in Italy has made it possible to classify the vast majority of the species that were assessed, in spite that information is still limited for many species. In the immediate future, research efforts should target priority species for conservation and species for which information is limited.