IUCN held a five-day workshop in Cambridge (UK) from 20th to 24th March 2017. This workshop is part of the ongoing LIFE European Red List initiative, which aims to assess the extinction risk of a selection of invertebrate and plant species in order inform policy and conservation decisions across the European region. Three of Alpine Landsnails Group members, Michael Duda, Zoltán Fehér and Willy De Mattia participate in this project as mollusc experts.
There are nearly 2,500 terrestrial molluscs in Europe, of which ca.1,200 were previously assessed as part of an earlier project in 2010, also funded by the European Commission. The aim of this Cambridge workshop (and the previous one held last year in Uppsala, Sweden) was to evaluate Red List assessments of the remaining terrestrial snails and slugs.
The workshop was held in The David Attenborough Building (DAB), a collaborative conservation hub that hosts more than ten UK and international NGOs, including the IUCN UK office.
A link to the report from the first stage of the Red List assessment project of European molluscs can be found here: http://bit.ly/2gYwOr3