Cardoso, Ana Cristina
[Mitwirkende:r];
Tsiamis, Konstantinos
[Mitwirkende:r];
Deriu, Ivan
[Mitwirkende:r];
D'Amico, Fabio
[Mitwirkende:r];
Gervasini, Eugenio
[Mitwirkende:r]
;
European Commission Joint Research Centre
Beschreibung:
Invasive Alien Species (IAS) are one of the main causes of biodiversity loss worldwide, a condition that severely affects Europe. The EU Regulation 1143/2014/EC (IAS Regulation), entered into force on 1 January 2015, establishes requirements for a coordinated set of actions to prevent, control and mitigate the impact of IAS. The IAS Regulation gives priority to a subset of IAS at European level, named as IAS of Union concern. By 1 June 2019, and every six years thereafter, MS shall report to the EC information about the implementation of the IAS Regulation. This report provides an analysis of the information reported by MS on the distribution of IAS of listed as of Union concern by 2017, recorded in their territory by December 2018. This information is correlated with the information available in the JRC baselines and complemented with MS notifications submitted via NOTSYS. The JRC baselines covered a period mostly overlapping the MS reporting period (2015-2018). For this reason, the spatial information in MS reports largely matched the JRC baselines. This also applies to species distribution records not validated by MS in the JRC baselines, proving that the JRC baselines provide good datasets, and are fit-for-purpose, for analyzing changes in species' distributions in relation to the implementation of the IAS Regulation. However, the observed differences could not be attributed to distributional trends of the species' populations, expanding or shrinking within EU countries. There were four main types of mismatch between the JRC baselines (MS validated records) and MS reports. Observed inconsistencies highlights the need of coherence in reporting updates on species' distributions and notification of new observations through NOTSYS. They may also reflect delays in data validation and synchronization among relevant data repositories, different interpretations among MS of what constitutes a detection of a regulated species requiring official notification, and on how to deal with casual records of species. The report provides recommendations aiming at addressing observed inconsistencies.