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Through the Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC) and the financial investments of the LIFE projects, Europe has become an experimental arena for biological conservation. With an estimated annual budget of €20 billion, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 has set an ambitious goal of classifying 30% of its land and sea territory as Protected Areas and ensuring no deterioration in conservation trends and the status of protected species. We analysed LIFE projects focused on animals from 1992 to 2018 and found that investment in vertebrates was six times higher than that for invertebrates (€970 versus €150 million), with birds and mammals alone accounting for 72% of species and 75% of the total budget. In relative terms, investment per species towards vertebrates has been 468 times higher than that for invertebrates. Using a trait-based approach, we show that conservation effort is primarily explained by species' popularity rather than extinction risk or body size. Therefore, we propose a roadmap to achieve unbiased conservation targets for 2030 and beyond.

. 1. The European Habitats Directive is the main legislative work regarding Europe's nature conservation policy. It lists the protected habitats and species in the European Union. The species lists include 122 arthropods. 2. The current lists of arthropods (Annexes II and IV) present, possibly among other, five obvious biases: taxonomic, geographic, range, size and aesthetic biases. Species of selected taxa (Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Odonata and Orthoptera), from Northern or Central Europe, relatively widespread, of a large body size and attractive are favoured over species of other taxa, from southern and Mediterranean Europe, endemic or relatively small or inconspicuous. Such biases are obstacles to the effective protection of the European fauna. 3. Two main strategies should be followed to avoid these problems and therefore increase the effectiveness of conservation policies: (i) the adoption of objective and transparent criteria for the listing of protected species, and (ii) implement regular updates and amendments to the lists based on such criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]