Authors: Chiarucci, Alessandro; Zannini, Piero;Di Musciano, Michele;Santovito, Diletta;jansen, Florian;Jiménez-Alfaro, Borja;Testolin, Riccardo;Cazzolla GAtti, Roberto;Rocchini, Duccio;Partners, EVA;

The biodiversity crisis is calling for urgent and effective measures of protection. Area-based conservation is a strategic pillar in the European Biodiversity Strategy, which aims to effectively protect 30% of area of member states by 2030. However, an assessment of the effectiveness of EU protected areas for plant biodiversity is still missing, limiting conservation planning capacity. With this project, we address the effectiveness of plant protection by the Natura 2000 Network across EU, using one of the largest plant diversity dataset, the European Vegetation Archive. We obtained a dataset composed by 1,223,017 vegetation plots. Species nomenclature and origin was standardized according to Euro+Med and we then focused the analyses on native species only. By overlapping plot location with the Natura 2000 network, we calculated alpha, beta and gamma diversity within and outside the network and compared these values across countries, biogeographic regions and habitat types. The Natura 2000 was found to host a significant portion of plant diversity, but differences are highlighted across countries, biogeographic regions and habitat types. The results here presented offer a baseline for the conservation planning needed to expand the Natura 2000 Network and achieve the targets for area-based conservation delineated in the European Biodiversity Strategy.