Europe
The legal protection of flora in Europe is based on the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community, the 1957 Treaty of Rome, and its provisions on nature conservation. These provisions were later incorporated into the 1992 Maastricht Treaty of the European Union, which serves as the foundation for Community directives establishing a common framework for the conservation of species and natural habitats. The Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC, commonly known as the Habitats Directive, aims to ensure biodiversity by conserving natural habitats and species of wild fauna and flora of Community interest. It promotes their protection by creating a network of natural areas known as the Natura 2000 Network. In order for a species to be included in Annex II of this directive and thus receive protection, it must be assessed against a number of criteria, including its rarity, population decline, degree of endemicity, and the importance of its conservation at Community level.
Spain
The Law 42/2007 on Natural Heritage and Biodiversity incorporates, in its article 54, a series of European guidelines, establishing the List of Wild Species under Special Protection Regime (LESPRE) and the Spanish Catalogue of Threatened Species (CEEA). Almost all the species featured in this exhibition are part of these lists, meaning that most of them have legal protection that obliges all administrations to protect and conserve them through active management measures.
The classification of each species requires specific actions, based on evaluations of the degree of threat to each species. These evaluations are carried out by experts through specific studies. The species assessments have been published since 2004 in the lists and red books promoted by the Spanish Administration, in accordance with the threat categories established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
This law, together with Royal Decree 139/2011, which develops the LESPRE and CEEA, assigns specific categories to the species included in the CEEA, such as ‘endangered’ and ‘vulnerable’, which have slightly different definition from those of the IUCN.
Autonomous Communities
At the autonomous community level, national regulation must be developed regionally, adding species that present specific risks in their territory and creating regional catalogues of endangered species. Additionally, specific natural areas are designated for their conservation. Among the most frequent measures included in this regional legislation are the protection of key habitats, restriction on activities that may affect plant populations, and the establishment of flora reserves.
In some cases, when a species faces a critical conservation status and its survival depends on specific actions, conservation and recovery plans are developed. These plans include strategies such as ex situ conservation in germplasm banks, reintroduction into suitable habitats, and population monitoring. The goal of these plans is to improve the conservation status and halt the decline of species with extremely reduced or severely threatened populations due to factors such as habitat destruction, competition with invasive species or climate change.
Red Lists and Red Books
These are dynamic tools to assess the degree of threat to flora, reflecting the state of knowledge at the time they are created. Botany, particularly plant taxonomy, is a constantly evolving science that discovers and identifies new species each year. Once described and their taxonomic status established, these species must be evaluated to determine if any threats could affect their survival. The result of this evaluation may lead to their inclusion in legal protection catalogues, a slow administrative process that can delay their effective protection. As a result, some of the species featured in this exhibition are currently undergoing this process, which is expected to culminate in the necessary legal amendment to ensure their protection.