The first consolidated list of fungi and lichens protected by national law in the EU

Eighteen statutes, read one by one

On 24 August 2026 the journal IMA Fungus published a review article by Daniel Janowski of the Institute of Dendrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kórnik. It assembles for the first time the fungi and lichens that carry legal protection anywhere in the European Union: 884 non-lichenised and 787 lichenised taxa, drawn from the national legislation of 18 member states. The paper is open access.

Legislation was traced for all 27 member states, the consolidated text of each act pulled from official legal repositories and the species schedules read out of it; regional acts were excluded. Only 18 states hold any national schedule at all, and of the remaining nine, four — France, Italy, Spain and Austria — were set aside because species protection there is left entirely to regions or provinces. Names were standardised against MycoBank in January 2026, duplicates merged and the statutory spelling kept in a separate column. The documents were retrieved in December 2025 and checked for amendments only as far as May 2026, so this is a snapshot rather than a live register — Lithuania amended its own list during 2026.

None of this is fieldwork. Publisher and Europe PMC alike classify the paper as a single-author review article: a compilation of legal texts plus statistics run on the resulting presence-absence matrix in Python 3.10.12, with the methods recording that the scripts were prepared with the help of Claude Sonnet 4.6.

No fungus is protected by EU law

The finding that matters most is an absence. The Bern Convention, the Habitats Directive and the Birds Directive carry appendices of plants and animals, and fungi are almost entirely missing from them; the single exception is the lichenised Cladonia sect. Cladina, which sits in Annex V of the Habitats Directive, listed under plants. National red lists do not close the gap, and the paper keeps the two apart: a red list is advisory and creates no prohibition, whereas a schedule in a statute does.

Fifteen member states protect non-lichenised fungi and 16 protect lichens, and 18 protect at least one of the two groups. The schedules are strikingly uneven, running from three to 420 taxa for fungi and from one to 472 for lichens; the longest belong to Croatia (420), Finland (247) and Poland (114) among fungi, and to Finland (472), Poland (199) and Luxembourg (117) among lichens. These are counts of rows in legal texts rather than of what grows in each country, and some entries sit above species level.

Length says nothing about effectiveness. Of the 884 protected fungal taxa, 649 (73.4%) are singletons, listed in one country and nowhere else, and among lichens the share rises to 630 of 787 (80.1%). A singleton would lose every scrap of legal protection in the Union if that one state revised its regulation, and singletons are the least examined: 8.6% carry a global IUCN assessment against 28.9% of taxa protected in two or more states. They come from the longest schedules — Croatia's 279 (66.4% of its own list) and Finland's 177 make up 70.3% of all fungal singletons.

What the figures do not certify

Appearing on a protection schedule is not a verdict on extinction risk. Only 124 of the 884 protected fungal taxa appear on the global IUCN Red List at all, and 50 of those are Least Concern; five protected lichens have a global assessment. The overlap is selective rather than random, though: of the 33 fungi identified in 2006 as European conservation priorities, 29 are now protected somewhere in the EU.

Poland's row needs a paragraph of its own, because it will not match the figure this catalogue already publishes for the Polish regulation. The 114 fungi and 199 lichens in Table 1, 313 together, are corrected counts, as its column heading says: standardised totals reached after synonyms were merged and spellings repaired. The regulation of 9 October 2014 itself numbers 322 positions, 232 under strict and 90 under partial protection, splitting into 117 non-lichenised fungi and 205 lichens — which the act, like the paper, calls lichenised fungi. Neither figure is wrong; they count different things.

Nor is the long Polish lichen schedule a mark of leadership. The author reads it the other way round: lichen lists, unlike fungal ones, are not nested, and the taxonomic distinctiveness of the Finnish and Polish schedules points to weak international agreement about which lichens matter. No singleton share is published for Poland.

What listing actually does

The paper offers no advice about collecting and settles nothing about what may be picked in any particular wood; that follows from the wording of each national statute. It does observe that long-term monitoring has found no effect of sustained picking on subsequent fruiting or on species richness, but that concerns edible species and leaves the prohibitions attached to listed ones exactly where they were. Janowski places the value of listing elsewhere: a listed taxon enters permitting procedures, impact assessments and the design of monitoring, and each permit leaves a record — applicant, justification, deciding authority — that an unlisted species never generates.

The consolidated schedules are published as a spreadsheet under the Open Database License, so a species can be traced country by country. Janowski also proposes folding fungi into the six-year monitoring cycles required by the Nature Restoration Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 — his proposal, not an existing obligation. The plainest thing a reader can check is the date at the foot of a statute: Poland's regulation has not been amended since 2014, and Slovenia's decree on wild fungi dates from 2011.