How well is Italian biodiversity represented in red lists and conservation legislation? Taxonomic biases, coverage gaps and the assessment-to-legislation bottleneck

Italy, one of Europe's most biodiverse countries, is expected to undergo landscape-wide nature recovery thanks to the EU Nature Restoration Regulation. National red lists represent critical instruments for informing conservation strategies at finer geographic resolutions and prioritizing taxa of national importance; yet the taxonomic completeness of Italian red lists remains unquantified in relation to national biodiversity. Equally, no systematic evaluation has been conducted on the representation of threatened and endemic Italian taxa within European and international conservation directives and treaties. We present the first comprehensive review of threat status and policy inclusion of It