How to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8 in Europe: priority-setting for seed banking of native threatened plants

The contribution of the European Native Seed Conservation Network (ENSCONET, 2004-2009) and the ENSCONET Consortium (since 2010) towards meeting the 2020 Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) target 8 was assessed in 2017. While the outcome was positive (62.7% of European threatened species already conserved ex situ in seed banks), the analysis showed that it was essential to provide guidance on which European native threatened species should be collected as a priority if the target was to be reached by 2020. In this paper we present a priority-setting method and its result, designed to guide collecting strategies across Europe to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8. The result of our study is a country-based checklist of European threatened taxa to be collected and stored ex situ across the seed banks of the ENSCONET Consortium by 2020. After discussing the results of the applied method, the ENSCONET Consortium Steering Committee has identified some key action points to support the implementation of such a collecting strategy across Europe in order to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8 for Europe.