Richness of forest-related species and habitats indicator 2012 dataset

This dataset refers to the Richness index of Species and Habitats of Conservation Concern indicator. This indicator has been developed to be used as a sub-indicator for contributing to the identification of the High Nature Value (HNV) Forest Areas as it will be integrated with other sub-indicators of horizontal structure, management and naturalness to generate the final composite indicator. It is composed itself of three sub-indicators: “Forest Non-bird species”, “Forest bird species” and “Forest habitats”. All the three sub-indicators build on distribution data from the reporting of habitat and species conservation status under Article 17 of the Habitats Directive and Article 12 of the Birds directive which describe their distribution at 10km grid resolution. The forest species and the forest habitats proposed to be used for the HNV forest area identification were selected based on expert judgement (ETC/BD) and raster files reporting the count of forest species and habitats were created. At this stage, no weight is applied based on Habitat and Species prioritization, conservation status or endemism. The sub-indicators were then normalized for each European forest type and successively combined not assigning any specific weight to a particular sub-indicator. The values for this indicator, present in this dataset, ranges between 0 and 1. The values close to 1 mean high presence of habitats and species related to forest, whereas the lower richness are closer to 0. It covers the forested areas of the EU27 Member States except for Cyprus (data from Croatia will be reported starting from the next update regarding the period 2013-2018).