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
Download the spreadsheet
Download latest version of the Conservation Designations
Spreadsheet (7 MB)
File name: Taxon_designations_20140822.zip
NB: the date last updated is included in the file title (eg
20140822 = 22/08/2014 and the file is zipped to facilitate
downloading. See details of the updating process to discover how this
spreadsheet differs from previous versions.
Spreadsheet contents and guidance for use
The spreadsheet contains over 11660 “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. Please note, this is not a fully
comprehensive collation of designations for UK species, for
example, local red list assessments are not included, and for some
reporting categories only selected annexes/appendices/schedules are
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
For a full explanation of what the spreadsheet contains and how
best to use it please look at the spreadsheet guidance.
The Conservation Designations spreadsheet had a big update in
April 2014. The version produced in August 2014 removed an
incorrect designation that had been mistakenly included. The
spreadsheet incorporates now pdates on The Wildlife and Countryside
Act, Section 42 of the NERC Act (Wales) and the Habitats Directive.
Three new red lists have been added: British Lichens and
Lichenicolous Fungi, Boletaceae and darkling beetles.
Further details and a full
list of updates carried out since the Conservation Designations
spreadsheet was first published is available to
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. Please,
let us know if you find any errors or if you would like to see any
other lists added to the compilation. Any new ideas of how to
improve the collation will be very welcomed.
out more about the updating process.