Suchergebnisse

In this work, I evaluate the impact of species distribution models (SDMs) on the current status of environmental and ecological journals by asking the question to which degree development of SDMs in the literature is related to recent changes in the impact factors of ecological journals. The hypothesis evaluated states that research fronts are likely to attract research attention and potentially drive citation patterns, with journals concentrating papers related to the research front receiving more attention and benefiting from faster increases in their impact on the ecological literature. My results indicate a positive relationship between the number of SDM related articles published in a journal and its impact factor (IF) growth during the period 2000–09. However, the percentage of SDM related papers in a journal was strongly and positively associated with the percentage of papers on climate change and statistical issues. The results support the hypothesis that global change science has been critical in the development of SDMs and that interest in climate change research in particular, rather than the usage of SDM per se, appears as an important factor behind journal IF increases in ecology and environmental sciences. Finally, our results on SDM application in global change science support the view that scientific interest rather than methodological fashion appears to be the major driver of research attraction in the scientific literature. ; This study has received financial support from the projects CGL2011-29539/BOS and Consolider Montes CSD2008-00040 granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) and it is also a contribution to the FP7-226852 project SCALES. Additional funding to LB was received from the Catalan government through project 2010 BE 272.

Nature and human society interact in complex ways with biodiversity underpinning the benefits that nature contributes to people (NCP) and human development often leading to significant losses in biodiversity through overexploitation and other drivers of change. These complex interactions result in large uncertainties that make it difficult for societies to resolve an appropriate course of collective action to adapt to or to mitigate change and to pursue sustainable livelihoods. Despite these uncertainties and complex interactions, it is important to understand the key interrelationships to develop effective management and policy strategies. However, social, economic and political conditions in the future may be very different from today. Scenarios and models provide means for exploring uncertainties about how different drivers of change might develop in the future and for considering how those changes might alter society's vulnerability and ability to take action. This improves understanding of the range of plausible futures in a region, alerts decision-makers to undesirable future impacts, and enables exploration of the effectiveness of policy options and management strategies. Here we develop an assessment of the range of plausible futures for Europe and Central Asia (ECA region) based on a review of exploratory scenarios. The consequences of these futures for nature, NCP and a good quality of life, as simulated by models taking account of uncertainties in projections of different drivers of change. We provide the foundation for understanding the key challenges that may be faced by society in moving towards a more sustainable future. In the assessment, we also describe what a sustainable future might look like by reviewing different visions of sustainable development and how these relate to the United Nations (UN), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the long‐term EU agendas and sustainability objectives. Possible pathways for achieving such visions are then appraised based on a review of pathways and normative scenarios. This analysis provides an assessment of the alternative policy choices or management interventions that can be used by decision-makers to move towards meeting sustainability goals and thereby support a good quality of life for the people of ECA by mitigating biodiversity loss and promoting a balanced supply of NCP. The ECA assessment takes an integrated approach to assessing the relationship between nature and society and how they are influenced by natural and anthropogenic direct drivers as well as institutions and governance and other indirect drivers. Furthermore, it builds on the analysis presented in the previous chapters of the ECA report by finally forming the foundation to further develop options for governance, institutional arrangements, and private and public decision-making for implementing the future policy responses analysed in the scenario and modelling studies. ; peerReviewed

L.T.K. was supported by a Victorian Postdoctoral Research Fellowship delivered by veski on behalf of the Victorian Government.

Europe's bioeconomy policy seeks to diversify the energy sources for industrial purposes through the gradual replacement of fossil fuels by the sustainable use of renewable biological resources (e.g. forest products), and therefore, to contribute to the mitigation of ongoing climate change. Sustainable harvesting levels of forest biomass to meet future demands of bioenergy and wood-based products need to be carefully evaluated, in order to minimize the potential negative impacts of forest exploitation/use on forest ecosystem functioning (and services provisioning) and on their associated biodiversity values. In this study we explore the effects of three European-level bioeconomy scenarios on the coverage of Mediterranean forests, their spatial distribution, and the fire regime (fire frequency and fire size) in Catalonia, a Mediterranean fire-prone region currently dominated by an agro-forest mosaic. The 'Business-as-usual' scenario assumes that no new bioeconomy policies are implemented, the 'EU bioenergy' scenario aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in EU28 by increasing bioenergy production, and the 'Global bioeconomy' scenario seeks to enhance a full development of bioeconomy based on bioenergy and the use of biomaterials. We first downscaled to the study region the outputs of GLOBIOM model, a global market equilibrium model that analyzes the competition for land use between the agriculture, forestry, and bioenergy sectors. It generates national-level demands for industrial roundwood and biomass for energy production. We link the outputs of the GLOBIOM to the MEDFIRE model. The MEDFIRE is a regional spatially explicit landscape dynamic model that accounts for vegetation growth, drought-induced mortality, establishment after fire, and afforestation. It incorporates a forest management and land-use change module, and also simulates fire behaviour and fire suppression actions. The combination of the two models allow us to obtain future spatially explicit projections of the Mediterranean forests distribution and coverage on an annual basis from 2010 to 2100, under each bioeconomy scenario. Results show that fire regime is progressively altered, both fire frequency and fire size will increase, in both bioenergy based scenarios due to a positive feedback between more fuel load availability and more severe climate. However, an increase on fire incidence reshape forest structure and compromise future wood demand to meet the bioenergy policies. Scenario projections will be further used to evaluate the potential impacts of each bioeconomy scenario on the provision of ecosystem services linked to Mediterranean forests, as well as their potential effects on biodiversity values. The work presented here is part of the Sumforest project FutureBioEcon. ; peerReviewed

Invasive species have considerably increased in recent decades due to direct and indirect effects of ever‐increasing international trade rates and new climate conditions derived from global change. We need to better understand how the dynamics of early species invasions develop and how these result in impacts on the invaded ecosystems. Here we studied the distribution and severe defoliation processes of the box tree moth (Cydalima perspectalis W.), a tree defoliator insect native to Asia and invasive in Europe since 2007, through the combination of species distribution models based on climate and landscape composition information. The results showed that the combination of data from the native and the invaded areas was the most effective methodology for the appropriate invasive species modeling. The species was not influenced by overall landscape factors, but only by the presence of its host plant, dispersal capacity, and climate suitability. Such climate suitability was described by low precipitation seasonality and minimum annual temperatures around 0°C, defining a continentality effect throughout the territory. We emphasize the need of studying distribution and severe defoliation processes separately because we identified that climate suitability was slightly involved in limiting species spread processes but strongly constrained ecosystem impact in terms of defoliation before the species reaches equilibrium with the new environment. New studies on habitat recovery after disturbance, ecological consequences of such impact, and community dynamics in a context of climate change are required for a better understanding of this invasive species. ; This study was funded by the Government of Spain through the INMODES (CGL2017‐89999‐C2‐2‐R).

Mediterranean forests are highly resilient to fires, showing a rapid recovery after disturbance. However, in some cases direct tree regeneration fails leading to radical changes in landscape composition. In this study, we evaluated the impact of landscape changes on the conservation value of bird species using the new landscape mosaic arising from non-direct regeneration after a fire. We used data from a large fire that occurred in central Catalonia (NE Spain) in 1998. The fire affected about 26,000 ha of a land mosaic mainly covered by Black Pine Pinus nigra forests and farmland dominated by cereal crops. We used line transects to estimate bird abundance and gathered information on dominant vegetation covers and landscape variables. Redundancy analysis (RDA) and generalized linear models were used to explore how the measured environmental variables explain bird species abundance and to analyze how post-fire heterogeneity in vegetation affected the conservation value of the bird community. Factors describing the main patterns in the post-fire landscape explained up to 31.2% of the total variability in bird community composition and described three main groups of bird species sharing similar ecological requirements. Additionally, 71% of the studied species significantly responded to one of the first three vegetation gradients distinguished in the study area. Finally, the conservation value of the bird community significantly decreased in areas dominated by Q. humilis resprouters and significantly increased in shrubland areas. Overall, our results suggest that large fires affecting non-direct regenerating forest types lead to a new and radically different mosaic landscape offering new opportunities to species with unfavourable European conservation status. ; This work is a contribution to the European Research Group GDRE "Mediterranean and mountain systems in a changing world" and has received financial support from the projects Consolider-Ingenio Montes (CSD2008-00040), CGL2008-05506-CO2/BOS and CGL2005-2000031/BOS granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. S.V. (FI fellowship) received financial support from the CUR of the DIUE from the Generalitat de Catalunya and the European Social Fund. L.B. benefited from a Ramon y Cajal contract from the Spanish government and E.L.Z. (FPI fellowship) received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.

Different components of global change can have interacting effects on biodiversity and this may influence our ability to detect the specific consequences of climate change through biodiversity indicators. Here, we analyze whether climate change indicators can be affected by land use dynamics that are not directly determined by climate change. To this aim, we analyzed three community-level indicators of climate change impacts that are based on the optimal thermal environment and average latitude of the distribution of bird species present at local communities. We used multiple regression models to relate the variation in climate change indicators to: i) environmental temperature; and ii) three landscape gradients reflecting important current land use change processes (land abandonment, fire impacts and urbanization), all of them having forest areas at their positive extremes. We found that, with few exceptions, landscape gradients determined the figures of climate change indicators as strongly as temperature. Bird communities in forest habitats had colder-dwelling bird species with more northern distributions than farmland, burnt or urban areas. Our results show that land use changes can reverse, hide or exacerbate our perception of climate change impacts when measured through community-level climate change indicators. We stress the need of an explicit incorporation of the interactions between climate change and land use dynamics to understand what are current climate change indicators indicating and be able to isolate real climate change impacts. ; This work has received financial support from the projects CGL2005-2000031/BOS, CGL2008-05506-C02-01/BOS and Consolider Montes CSD2008-00040 granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC). Partial funding was also provided by the Catalan Government grant SGR2009-531. LB benefited from a Ramón y Cajal contract and MC from a Juan de la Cierva contract, both funded by MEC.

Aim To assess the spatial patterns of forest expansion (encroachment and densification) for mountain pine (Pinus uncinata Ram.) during the last 50 years at a whole mountain range scale by the study of different topographic and socio-economic potential drivers in the current context of global change. Location The study area includes the whole distributional area of mountain pine in the Catalan Pyrenees (north-east Spain). This represents more than 80 municipalities, covering a total area of 6018 km2. Methods Forest cover was obtained by image reclassification of more than 200 pairs of aerial photographs taken in 1956 and 2006. Encroachment and densification were determined according to changes in forest cover, and were expressed as binary variables on a 150 × 150 m cell-size grid. We then used logistic regression to analyse the effects of several topographic and socio-economic variables on forest expansion. Results In the period analysed, mountain pine increased its surface coverage by 8898 ha (an increase of more than 16%). Mean canopy cover rose from 31.0% in 1956 to 55.6% in 2006. Most of the expansion was found on north-facing slopes and at low altitudes. Socio-economic factors arose as major factors in mountain pine expansion, as encroachment rates were higher in municipalities with greater population losses or weaker primary sector development. Main conclusions The spatial patterns of mountain pine expansion showed a good match with the main patterns of land-use change in the Pyrenees, suggesting that land-use changes have played a more important role than climate in driving forest dynamics at a landscape scale over the period studied. Further studies on forest expansion at a regional scale should incorporate patterns of land-use changes to correctly interpret drivers of forest encroachment and densification. ; This research was primarily supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation via the Consolider-Ingenio Montes project (CSD2008-00040) and the DINAMIX project (AGL2009-13270-C02). It was also supported by a Ramon y Cajal contract to L. Coll and L. Brotons, and a doctoral grant to the first author (AP2007-01663). Additional funding came from the Departament de Medi Ambient of the Regional Catalan Government. The authors thank the Department of Geography of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona for kindly providing access to aerial photographs, and Dr Gonzalez-Olabarria for valuable input on drafting the manuscript.

The European Union (EU) has made significant conservation efforts in the last two decades, guided by the Birds and Habitats Directives, currently under evaluation. Despite these efforts a large proportion of priority species are still in unfavorable condition and continue declining. For this reason, a thoughtful review of the implementation of conservation efforts in Europe is needed to identify potential causes behind this poor effectiveness. We compiled information on the distribution of all conservation funds under the LIFE-Nature, the main financial tool for conservation in Europe. We found that LIFE-Nature has not adequately covered continental conservation needs. The majority of funds have been directed toward nonthreatened species or regions of low conservation priority. Given the limited resources available, two key aspects are in urgent need for revision and improvement. First, the distribution of funds should be guided by continental and global conservation needs and planned at the EU scale. Second, new mechanisms are required to set conservation priorities in a dynamic fashion, rather than relying on fixed lists (i.e., the Directives' Annexes) that may rapidly become outdated. These improvements would require new mechanisms to set priorities and redistribution of conservation efforts, supported by adequate policy and a more effective top-down control on investment. ; Peer Reviewed

In response to the processes threatening biodiversity such as habitat loss, effective selection of priority conservation areas is required. However, reserve selection methods usually ignore the drivers of future habitat changes, thus compromising the effectiveness of conservation. In this work, we formulated an approach to explicitly quantify the impact of fire on conservation areas, considering such disturbance as a driver of land-cover changes. The estimated fire impact was integrated as a constraint in the reserve selection process to tackle the likely threats or opportunities that fire disturbance might cause to the targeted species depending on their habitat requirements. In this way, we selected conservation areas in a fire-prone Mediterranean region for two bird assemblages: forest and open-habitat species. Differences in conservation areas selected before and after integrating the impact of fire in the reserve selection process were assessed. Integration of fire impact for forest species moved preferences towards areas that were less prone to burn. However, a larger area was required to achieve the same conservation goals. Conversely, integration of fire impacts for open-habitat species shifted preferences towards conservation areas in locations where the persistence of their required habitat is more likely (i.e. shrublands). In other words, we prioritized the conservation of not only the current distribution of open-habitat birds, but also the disturbance process (i.e. fire) that favours their preferred habitat and distributions in the long term. Finally, this work emphasizes the need to consider the opposing potential impacts of wildfires on species for an effective conservation planning. ; This work has received financial support from the Spanish Government Grants CGL2008-05506-C02-01/BOS, Consolider-Montes CSD2008-00040, the Catalan Government Grant SGR2009-531, the EU-FP7-SCALES project and CGL2011-29539/BOS BIONOVEL project.

The European Union (EU) has made significant conservation efforts in the last two decades, guided by the Birds and Habitats Directives, currently under evaluation. Despite these efforts a large proportion of priority species are still in unfavorable condition and continue declining. For this reason, a thoughtful review of the implementation of conservation efforts in Europe is needed to identify potential causes behind this poor effectiveness. We compiled information on the distribution of all conservation funds under the LIFE‐Nature, the main financial tool for conservation in Europe. We found that LIFE‐Nature has not adequately covered continental conservation needs. The majority of funds have been directed toward nonthreatened species or regions of low conservation priority. Given the limited resources available, two key aspects are in urgent need for revision and improvement. First, the distribution of funds should be guided by continental and global conservation needs and planned at the EU scale. Second, new mechanisms are required to set conservation priorities in a dynamic fashion, rather than relying on fixed lists (i.e., the Directives' Annexes) that may rapidly become outdated. These improvements would require new mechanisms to set priorities and redistribution of conservation efforts, supported by adequate policy and a more effective top‐down control on investment. ; V.H. and M.C. were supported by two Ramón y Cajal contracts funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (RYC‐2013‐13979 and RYC‐2010‐06431, respectivey).

Available data show that future changes in global change drivers may lead to an increasing impact of fires on terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Yet, fire regime changes in highly humanised fire-prone regions are difficult to predict because fire effects may be heavily mediated by human activities We investigated the role of fire suppression strategies in synergy with climate change on the resulting fire regimes in Catalonia (north-eastern Spain). We used a spatially-explicit fire-succession model at the landscape level to test whether the use of different firefighting opportunities related to observed reductions in fire spread rates and effective fire sizes, and hence changes in the fire regime. We calibrated this model with data from a period with weak firefighting and later assess the potential for suppression strategies to modify fire regimes expected under different levels of climate change. When comparing simulations with observed fire statistics from an eleven-year period with firefighting strategies in place, our results showed that, at least in two of the three sub-regions analysed, the observed fire regime could not be reproduced unless taking into account the effects of fire suppression. Fire regime descriptors were highly dependent on climate change scenarios, with a general trend, under baseline scenarios without fire suppression, to large-scale increases in area burnt. Fire suppression strategies had a strong capacity to compensate for climate change effects. However, strong active fire suppression was necessary to accomplish such compensation, while more opportunistic fire suppression strategies derived from recent fire history only had a variable, but generally weak, potential for compensation of enhanced fire impacts under climate change. The concept of fire regime in the Mediterranean is probably better interpreted as a highly dynamic process in which the main determinants of fire are rapidly modified by changes in landscape, climate and socioeconomic factors such as fire suppression strategies. ; This study has received financial support from the projects CGL2008-05506-C02-01/BOS, CGL2011-29539/BOS and Consolider Montes CSD2008-00040 granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC). Additional funding to LB and MC was received from the Catalan government through projects 2010 BE 272 and the 'Beatriu de Pinós' Programme (2009 BP-B 00342).

Ecological processes within forests provide vital ecosystem services to society, most of which depend on the persistence of tree cover that can be altered after the impact of a disturbance. The aim of the present study was to examine the role of seed dispersal and resprouting that mediate resilience to large fires and evaluate the economic costs that these ecological functions provide. We used field data from 412 plots of the Spanish National Forest Inventory providing information on pre- and post-fire conditions of Mediterranean Pinus spp. and Quercus spp.-dominated forests. Then, we determined the need for restoration (N Rest) and estimated the minimum pre-fire densities needed to ensure adequate post-fire cover. Economic valuations were assessed through three different scenarios (Sc) of possible human-management actions aimed at ensuring proper post-fire tree cover: Sc. 1) a pre-fire management scenario evaluating the costs of planting Quercus spp. seedlings in the understory, mimicking the whole dispersal function; Sc. 2) a pre-fire scenario in which enrichment plantations increased the densities of natural oaks; and Sc. 3) a post-fire scenario where the restoration is done through planting pines within the burned area. Approximately 90% of the burned area (371 out of 412 plots) was able to recover after fire supporting the view that Mediterranean forests are resilient to fire. This resilience was primarily mediated by biotic seed dispersal and posterior resprouting of tree species. These ecological functions saved between 626 and 1,326 €/ha compared to the human-management actions. Ensuring key ecological processes within forests increases forest resilience and recovery after fire leading to a generally significant saving of economic resources. In a perspective of increased future impact of disturbances and decrease availability of economic resources for forest management, the implications of the present study can be far reaching and extended to other forest planning exercises. ; This research was primarily supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation via CGL2008-05506-C02-01/BOS project and the Consolider-Ingenio Montes project (CSD2008-00040); a Ramon y Cajal contract to LB and LC; and a Juan de la Cierva contract to JRG. CPP was partially supported by a Fundacion Caja Madrid grant. Partial funding was also provided by the Catalan Government grant SGR2009-531.

Monitoring biodiversity is a fundamental tool for its conservation, as it provides information that can guide and eventually improve the effectiveness of management outcomes. Citizen-science is increasingly advocated as a complement to governmental monitoring programs to overcome scarcity of resources and deliver important information for policy-making. In this study, we used the spatial optimization tool Marxan to explore the advantages and limitations of combining government and citizen-science monitoring networks to achieve monitoring targets for bird species of conservation concern for the EU in Catalonia (NE Spain), a region where both schemes are well established. We designed and compared optimal monitoring networks under four different scenarios: (1) the No-constraints scenario simulates a monitoring network built ex novo, assuming no prior monitoring efforts and no spatial constraints to the selection of monitoring sites; (2) the Protected Areas–only, in which the monitoring would occur exclusively within protected areas where resources from the Regional Administration exist – e.g. personnel - that could be mobilized for monitoring surveys; (3) the Protected Areas–Extended recognizes existing monitoring efforts within the network of protected areas, and allows also monitoring efforts outside protected areas to achieve the monitoring targets for the bird species; (4) Protected Areas-Citizen Science recognizes both the existing resources within protected areas as well as the existing citizen-science bird monitoring programs. The four monitoring network schemes sought to cover the distribution of bird species of conservation concern for the EU in Catalonia under different pressure levels (low, medium and high) of the main threats to each species (agricultural intensification, closure of open spaces, forest immaturity, freshwater pollution and urban development) . In our case study, current government efforts, limited to public land and protected areas, were insufficient to cover the whole spectrum of target species and threat levels, reinforcing the assumption that citizen-science data can greatly assist in achieving monitoring targets. However, simply carrying out both government and citizen-science monitoring ad hoc led to inefficiency and duplication of efforts: some species were represented in excess of monitoring targets while several combinations of species-threat levels were under-sampled. Our study highlights the importance of accounting for species threats when designing monitoring networks, since the ability to link detected negative species trends to potential drivers would make the monitoring data more directly useful for policy decisions. Our results also suggest policy-making should concentrate on providing an adequate platform for coordination of government and citizen-science monitoring to minimize duplicated efforts, overcome the biases of each monitoring scheme and obtain the best from both. ; peerReviewed