Context

The world-wide loss of biological diversity has increased in the past decades and finally gained public attent ion and no longer doubted. These trends to prevent biodiversity loss is without a doubt the largest challenge for the 21st century. The Federal Republic of Germany has not only an ethical, but also a legal obligation for the preservation and development of species diversity in its respective local and regional development. This is embodied in federal nature protection laws, in respective state laws and in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The states of the Federal Republic of Germany and their protection agencies have provided substantial expenditures in money and resources for nature protection and country-wide research for protection programmes for certain plant species or groups of species. After three decades, a hot list and an inventory of endangered species is therefore necessary to balance the results of past efforts, to point out successes and causes for failures, and to make possible an exchange of experiences. At the same time new, success-oriented action priorities for future development must be set.

Goals of the conference was:

• to represent the conditions of past species protection programmes and their implementation in the different regions of Germany
• to summarise the results of these programmes
• to supply an evaluating synopsis of the past evaluations of providers from species protection programmes
• to develop action-oriented conclusions and recommendations for implementation (see “Augsburger Resolution”)
• to promote the exchange between persons who work on programmes for the protection of species.

In the first part of the conference an overview of the different programmes for species protection was made, in order to evaluate these programmes and make recommendations. The second part of the conference focused heavily on implementation whereby in several workshops detailed discussion rounds took place. The presentations and results of the discussions on improving framework conditions for botanical protection of species (“Augsburger Resolution”) were published in the BfN series of publications for botanical knowledge (Schriftenreihe für Vegetationskunde), Number 36.