Quantification of the overall protection of threatened fauna and flora species from France, globally and across territories and taxonomic groups

In a context of rapid biodiversity loss, the protection of threatened species has become a crucial stake. By comparing the reference databases of threatened and protected fauna and flora species from France, we quantified the gap between threat evaluation and protection legislation. More than half of threatened species are not protected. The distribution over taxonomic groups and administrative units display a largely uneven bias geographically towards mainland France and Corsica, and taxonomically towards the vertebrates’ group. Such bias can also be found among described species and species classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which leads to an underestimation of the number of threatened species. It becomes urgent to accelerate the evaluation of species threat level and to improve their protection – either directly or indirectly (e.g. through the protection of “umbrella species”, selected based on documented species to species, or species to habitats relationships) to use protection status as an efficient mean to stop and reverse the decline.