Jose Manuel Álvarez-Martínez

Biodiversity Research Institute (IMIB) · CSIC-University of Oviedo- Principality of Asturias

The report demonstrates the potential workflows to leverage monitoring data on biodiversity to assess the status of two selected habitats of the Habitats Directive, Nardus grasslands (EU habitats directive Annex I 6230*) and forest dominated by Fagus sylvatica on acidic soils (habitat 9110).

Europe has committed to upscale ecosystems protection to include 30% of land and sea. However, due to historical overexploitation of natural assets, the available area for biodiversity protection is severely limited. Riparian zones are natural ecotones between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, contributing disproportionately to regional biodivers...

The declines of species are caused by a combination of factors that affect survival or breeding success. We studied the effects of a set of environmental and anthropogenic variables on the disappearance of African houbara bustards Chlamydotis undulata fuertaventurae on Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), once the main stronghold of this endangered bird...

The goal of this study is to assess the potential of the Copernicus product Riparian Zones and a riparian vegetation cartographic base to fulfill the riparian zone characterization requirements within four European policy initiatives (Water Framework Directive; Habitats Directive; Floods Directive; EU’s Biodiversity strategy for 2030). We reviewed...

Passive rewilding means the spontaneous regeneration of ecosystems after the abandonment of human land use. It may represent an opportunity to recover biodiversity and ecosystem services under global environmental crisis, but may also entail declines of certain species, changes in disturbance regimes and losses of cultural values. In this review, w...

Nota sobre creación de un Grupo de Trabajo en la AEET: BigBioData, Seguimiento de la Biodiversidad en la era del Big data

El seguimiento y evaluación de la distribución, estructura y funcionamiento de la biodiversidad, así como los efectos que ejercen diferentes presiones y amenazas sobre su conservación y dinámica en un contexto de Cambio Global, constituyen uno de los grandes retos de la ciencia actual y un eje crítico en las agendas de numerosas agencias gubernamen...

We studied the effects of visibility, female and male distribution, microhabitat and distance to human infrastructure on display site selection in a ground-dwelling bird, the Canarian houbara bustard. Using a very high-resolution digital elevation model based on LIDAR technology, and a complete census of the breeding population, we compared 98 disp...

Background The home range of an animal is determined by its ecological requirements, and these may vary depending on many intrinsic and extrinsic factors, which are ultimately driven by food resources. Investigating the effects of these factors, and specifically how individuals use food resources within their home ranges is essential to understand...

El seguimiento de la respuesta espectral obtenida por sensores remotos de media resolución relativo a formaciones vegetales puede proporcionar información muy relevante para el estudio de su distribución y dinámica a lo largo de gradientes ambientales y escalas geográficas. La combinación del ciclo orbital y el ancho de barrido de Sentinel 2 propor...

Urbanization and agricultural intensification are the main drivers of biodiversity losses through multiple stressors, especially habitat fragmentation, isolation and loss. Designing Blue and Green Infrastructure Networks (BGIN) has been recommended as a potential tool for land-use planning to increase ecosystem services while preserving biodiversit...

Land burning has long been used as an effective means of land management. Used in a controlled manner, the burning of vegetation to clear land can have minimal effects on the natural environment. However, uncontrolled land burning, where fires are allowed to spread beyond the intended area, can have severe and detrimental effects on ecosystem funct...

A good location of song or call posts and visual display sites of males is crucial for territory defence and mate attraction. These sites are typically located at prominent positions to ensure an efficient, long-distance sexual advertisement. If the purpose of display sites is to maximize visibility, a suitable strategy would be to use multiple dis...

Recent global-scale environmental issues from climate change to biodiversity loss are generating an intense social pressure on the scientific community [...]

Human activities have caused a significant change in the function and services that ecosystems have provided to society since historical times. In mountainous landscapes, the regulation of services such as water quality or erosion control has been impacted by land use and land cover (LULC) changes, especially the loss and fragmentation of forest pa...

Migratory birds typically fly long distances in response to large-scale seasonal climate variation. However, most migratory species are partial migrants, and some fly only short distances , for example to take advantage of suitable feeding conditions during the non-breeding season. In spite of their short distance, such migrations may also be fixed...

Context Afforestation is one of the major drivers of land cover change in the world. In spite of its multiple applications, forest generation has been fostered during the last century to achieve few specific objectives such as timber production or catchment erosion protection. However, new afforestation programs are required to meet multiple object...

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) represents the largest pool of organic carbon in fluvial ecosystems. The majority of DOM in rivers is of terrigenous origin—making DOM composition highly dependent on vegetation cover and soil properties. While deforestation is still a worldwide anthropogenic phenomenon, current land cover change in temperate regions...

This paper presents plans and efforts on European Union (EU) Member States (MSs) (including Norway and Iceland)-specific support for monitoring emissions and removals from land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) which are built on existing and forthcoming Copernicus data and services. Land use and change between land uses are mapped using a...

Blue-green infrastructure (BGI) is becoming a more popular means of dealing with climate change and climate change-related events. However, as the concept of BGI is relatively new, many urban and rural planners are unfamiliar with the barriers they may face during the lifecycle of a BGI project. As a result, some have been hesitant to adopt BGI sol...

Digital soil mapping (DSM) is an effective mapping technique that supports the increased need for quantitative soil data. In DSM, soil properties are correlated with environmental characteristics using statistical models such as regression. However, many of these relationships are explicitly described in mechanistic simulation models. Therefore, th...

Artículo publicado en el Boletín de la Red de Seguimiento del Cambio global en Parques nacionales Nº7 donde presentamos la Red de Seguimiento del cambio global en los ecosistemas acuáticos del Parque Nacional de los Picos de Europa. Desde el año 2012 el Instituto de Hidráulica Ambiental de la Universidad de Cantabria (IHCantabria) ha implementado y...

Over a decade after the publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment an increasing number of ES modeling applications from local to global scales have been created. ALICE, Improving the management of Atlantic Landscapes: aCcounting for bIodiversity and eCosystem sErvices,is a project that will develop a comprehensive package of new methods, t...

Over a decade after the publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment an increasing number of ES modeling applications from local to global scales have been created. ALICE, Improving the management of Atlantic Landscapes: aCcounting for bIodiversity and eCosystem sErvices,is a project that will develop a comprehensive package of new methods, t...

Aim: Developing a methodology to map the distribution of riparian forests to entire river networks and determining the main environmental factors controlling their spatial patterns. Location: Cantabrian region, northern Spain. Methods: We mapped the riparian forests at a physiognomic and phytosociological level by delimiting riparian zones and gene...

El seguimiento de la distribución y el estado de conservación de los hábitats enumerados en el Anexo I de la Directiva de Hábitats de la UE (92/43/CEE) se debe informar a la Comisión cada seis años según el artículo 17. Para proporcionar datos precisos sobre cinco hábitats forestales en las Islas Baleares (España) dentro del período 2013-2018, se c...

Si el concepto de “geografía vegetal” o biogeografía nace en América latina en 1807 con los estudios de Humbolt en la Cordillera de los Andes, los primeros mapas de vegetación fueron publicados en el norte de Europa a mediados del siglo XIX. Sin embargo, el desarrollo de la cartografía de la vegetación ocurrió en el siglo XX con la aparición de la...

Understanding how different food resources sustain stream food webs is fundamental towards increasing our knowledge on trophic structure and energy flow pathways in fluvial ecosystems. Food webs in small mountain streams are sustained by autochthonous (instream primary production) and allochthonous (inputs from the terrestrial ecosystem) organic re...

Aim Power lines can represent an important source of bird mortality through collision. The identification of more susceptible species, in terms of expected population‐level impacts, requires detailed biological and mortality information that is often difficult to obtain. Here, we propose a species prioritization method based on relatively easily ac...

Species distribution modelling may support ecologists in conservation decision-making. However, the applicability of management recommendations depends on the uncertainty associated to the modelling process. A key source of uncertainty is the underspecificity of the research question. Modelling specific questions is straightforward since they drive...

ALICE, Improving the management of Atlantic Landscapes: accouting for bIodiversity and eCosystem sErvices,will develop a comprehensive package of new methods, tools and procedures to identify barriers to the delivery of benefits from Blue and Green Infrastructures (BGI) implementation and to improve the characterization of biodiversity and the valu...

Supervised classification converts digital data of satellite imagery into categorical land-cover classes suitable for end users. Far away from being an easy process, many factors such as landscape heterogeneity and topography cause radiometric exchange among classes that needs to be filtered out prior quantitative applications. To address this prob...

The Cordillera Cantábrica (CC) presents a series of singularities that make this area an excellent place for monitoring the effects of global change. This study analyses the need to generate an interregional observatory of global change, which would integrate current knowledge about these mountains and help setting priorities in the generation of n...

Detailed, spatially exhaustive soil data on Soil Organic Matter (SOM) content are required to analyse the state of the Natura 2000 areas in the Cantabria region (Spain). These data can be obtained using digital soil mapping (DSM) techniques. However, DSM on SOM content at the regional scale has proven to be difficult. The SOM content is influenced...

Aim We investigate whether (1) environmental predictors allow to delineate the distribution of discrete community types at the continental scale and (2) how data completeness influences model generalization in relation to the compositional variation of the modelled entities. Location Europe. Methods We used comprehensive datasets of two community...

This study aims to clarify the influence of forests, as well as other prevalent land cover types, on extreme hydrological events through a land cover gradient design. We selected 10 catchments within a gradient of forest land cover, in which there were 15 years of simultaneous daily hydrological and meteorological data, and an additional forest des...

Hydrological variability over seasonal and multi-annual timescales strongly shapes the ecological structure and functioning of floodplain ecosystems. The current IPCC climate scenario foresees an increase in the frequency of extreme events. This, in conjunction with other anthropogenic disturbances (e.g., river regulation or land-use changes) poses...

A current challenge of biodiversity and conservation is the estimation of the spatial extent of habitat types across broad territories. In the absence of fine‐resolution maps, predictive modelling helps in assessing the spatial distribution of vegetation cover. However, such approaches are still uncommon in regional planning and management. Here, w...

Aim Species distribution models based on breeding occurrence data allow for identifying both environmental drivers and geographic areas potentially relevant for breeding. However, the interpretation of model predictions in terms of reproductive performance should be further investigated, as this information is crucial for conservation planning. We...

Land cover and soil properties largely determine how climatic and hydrological regimes interact and produce hydrological stress in aquatic ecosystems. This study aims to clarify the influence of forests, as well as other majoritarian land cover types, on hydrological regime through an experimental design without the main limitations associated with...

The European Landscape Convention encourages the inventory and characterization of landscapes for environmental management and planning actions. Among the range of data sources available for landscape classification, remote sensing has substantial applicability, although difficulties might arise when available data are not at the spatial resolution...

Aim Species distribution modelling ( SDM ) allows identification of suitable areas where the species might occur. The Grinnellian approach relates species occurrence to abiotic limiting factors, such as topography and climate, measured at present or averaged over time at large spatial scales, whilst Eltonian approaches relate processes as reproduct...

In Mediterranean mountainous areas, forests have expanded in recent decades because traditional management practices have been abandoned or reduced. However, understanding the ecological mechanisms behind landscape change is a complex undertaking because the influence of land use may be reinforced or constrained by abiotic factors such as climate....

The distinction between true lekking and resource-defense mating systems is difficult in exploded-lekking species, where resources in male territories may influence female choice. Here, we propose the use of path analysis as a way to establish the relative importance of phenotypic characteristics versus food resources on mating success and hence de...

We studied the effects of female distribution, topography, and human infrastructures on lek-site selection in a ground-displaying bird, the great bustard Otis tarda. Our aim was to investigate the relative importance of maximizing visibility to females (hotspot hypothesis) versus minimizing predation risk (predation avoidance hypothesis). Using a g...

Durante las últimas décadas, diversos factores ambientales y socioeconómicos han modificado el paisaje original del Espacio Natural de La Sierra de Ancares (León), situado en el extremo occidental de la Cordillera Cantábrica, determinando su actual estructura y función. En concreto, la mayoría de los bosques han sido destruidos como consecuencia de...

In this study we developed a methodology aimed at improving the assessment of inter-annual land cover dynamics from hard classified remotely sensed data in heterogeneous and resilient landscapes. The methodology is implemented for the Spanish Natural Park of Sierra de Ancares, where human interference during the last century has resulted in the des...

En este trabajo se presentan los resultados del estudio de emisiones de CO2, uno de los gases más importantes de efecto invernadero, debido a la actividad desarrollada en el Campus de Vegazana de la Universidad de León, para el año 2006. El estudio se enmarca en un proyecto más amplio de cálculo del indicador Huella Ecológica (HE), desarrollado par...