Natural habitats of Community interest

Two layers of information available: — Natural habitats of Community interest (year 2005), which has been downloaded from the Atlas and Manual of Natural and Semi-natural Habitats of Spain, published by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food and Environment (MAPAMA). As a result of the implementation in Spain of the Habitat Directive (92/43/EEC) the Ministry of Environment carried out a pioneering work between 2000 and 2003 in order to recognise and protect natural habitats. This work was carried out with the collaboration of the autonomous communities, in this way it was possible to present to Europe the most representative habitats of our autonomous community. As a result of this huge amount of data, in 2005 the basic guide “The habitat types of Community interest in Spain” was published in which each of the habitats studied is described and located at national level. The work carried out allowed to generate a high resolution Canarian mapping regarding the distribution of these habitats, covering the terrestrial and marine areas. The layer of natural habitats of Community interest (year 2005) allows to expand knowledge about the habitats of Community interest present on our islands and has been a reference during the process of defining the proposals for Sites of Community Importance (PLIC) in Spain and has formed the basis on which the areas that have currently been integrated into the European ecological network Natura 2000 have been chosen, forming the Areas of Special Conservation (ZEC). However, its low resolution (prepared at 1:50000 scale) and the existence of more recent sources of information discourages its current use in the Canary Islands, having become a historical map. — Natural habitats of Community interest (year 2016), layer provided by the Biodiversity Service of the Vice-Administration of the Environment of the Government of the Canary Islands. It has been built with enclosures extracted from the map of vegetation of the Canary Islands of 2006 to which, in 2016, they have been associated with the habitat type according to the corresponding vegetation. However, this does not imply the representation of all the natural habitat types of Community interest present in the Canary Islands, since some of these do not have a good representation through the polygons of the vegetation map. This is the case, for example, of habitat 8320 lava fields and natural excavations, in which the subtypes corresponding to it have a greater geological character; thus, it is not possible to represent with the vegetation map subtypes such as a) volcanic ash fields and lapillis, b) volcanic tubes or c) fumaroles. It is also the case of communities that, due to their ecological characteristics, have a small geographical extent in the Canary Islands and do not have a good representation on the vegetation map due to the scale of its edition; this is the case, for example, with habitat 3150 natural eutrophic lakes with vegetation Magnopotamion or Hydrocharition.