Hereafter, both groups, i.e. threatened species according to red list criteria, and birds of conservation concern, are jointly referred to as threatened and conservation concern species (TCCS). Scale-dependent red listing data Our aim was to selleck compound identify species listed in red lists compiled at three spatial scales: local (provincial), national (Polish), and European; but the relevant red lists appeared to be very incomplete (Table 1). A local assessment was available only for vascular plants (Kącki et al. 2003) in Lower Silesia (19,948 km2), i.e. the south-westernmost part of Poland, where our survey was conducted. Lists of nationally threatened species were compiled for each

IWR-1 in vitro taxon studied, GDC-0973 mouse i.e. vascular plants (Zarzycki and Szeląg 2006), birds (Głowaciński 2002), and bryophytes divided into separate lists of threatened mosses (Żarnowiec et al. 2004), liverworts and hornworts (Klama 2006). All these assessments used the IUCN categories and criteria; however, because insufficient data were available on population sizes of particular taxa and no permanent monitoring was undertaken once the lists had been compiled, the classifications were based on expert estimates of particular organisms.

At the European scale, a complete assessment is available only for bryophytes (Schumacker and Martiny 1995). The threat status of European vascular plants was recently assessed (Bilz et al. 2011), but this compilation includes only 1,826 species (around 8 % of Europe’s plant species). These are divided into three functional groups: plants listed in European and international policy instruments (PI), crop wild relatives (CWR), and European aquatic plants (AP). Although there is no comprehensive red list of European birds, all species meeting the IUCN Red List Criteria for filipin the “critically endangered”, “endangered”, “vulnerable”

or “near threatened” categories at a European level were identified by BirdLife International (2004). Data analysis We used selected spatial scales (local, national and European) to compare the occurrence of TCCS in three types of field margins on the one hand, and the percentages of TCCS in Europe, in Poland and in field margins on the other. We used the local red list for vascular plants, the national red list for bryophytes, and the assessment of conservation status at the European level for birds. Such an approach resulted in the highest number of species in each taxonomic group and lent itself to statistical evaluation. Since most variables had many zero values and skewed distributions, they were analyzed by using non-parametric tests. The Chi square test of independence was used to compare the percentages of TCCS in Europe, in Poland, and in field margins. The Kruskal–Wallis analysis of variance was used to compare the occurrence of TCCS in the three types of field margins.