Bruno Silva

• PhD student
• PhD Student at Universidade de Évora

Pest control services provided by naturally occurring species (the so-called biocontrol services) are widely recognized to provide key incentives for biodiversity conservation. This is particularly relevant for vertebrate-mediated biocontrol services as many vertebrate species are of conservation concern, with most of their decline associated to la...

1. Passive acoustic monitoring, a non-invasive technique, is increasingly used to study animal populations and habitats at much larger spatial and temporal scales than standard methods. However, easy to apply tools for reliable detection and classification of signals of interest among hundreds or even thousands of hours of recording are still lacki...

Biocontrol services are widely recognized to provide key incentives for bat conservation. However, we have virtually no information on whether and how disruptions in bat‐mediated biocontrol services are driven by mismatches between the temporal activity patterns of insectivorous bats and insect pests. We investigated the temporal relationship betwe...

Climate change poses major challenges for agriculture. Considering that crop yield and quality will likely decline under less favourable temperature and future precipitation regimes is therefore becoming a major concern for scientists, producers and policymakers alike. Hereby, we describe a conceptual framework aimed to provide a climate-smart pest...

Inland freshwaters are essential in maintaining ecological balance and supporting human development. However, comprehensive water data cataloguing remains insufficient, especially for small water bodies (i.e., ponds), which are overlooked despite their ecological importance. To address this gap, remote sensing has emerged as a possible solution for...

CONTEXT The Iberian Peninsula is the world's largest olive (Olea europaea subsp. europaea L.) producing region due to its high environmental suitability for olive growing, consistently accounting for about half of the global share. Moreover, it includes a range of olive-producing regions with Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), aimed to safeguar...

Political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in city soundscapes around the globe.From March to October 2020, a consortium of 261 contributors from 35 countries brought togetherby the Silent Cities project built a unique soundscape recordings collection to report on local acousticchanges in urban areas. We present this collection her...

Inland freshwater resources in semiarid environments play a key role in maintaining ecological systems and supporting human development. Space-based remote sensing spatiotemporal data have emerged as a new paradigm for understanding ecohydrological processes and trends, particularly in water-stressed areas. However, comprehensive cataloging is stil...

Biodiversity conservation faces significant challenges due to human-induced climate and habitat change. Understanding these threats' effects and interactions is crucial for effective conservation planning. Here, we present the lconnect R package, a user-friendly tool for assessing landscape connectivity and prioritizing habitat patches. The package...

Public health and environmental concerns are increasing the pressure to reduce chemical pesticide usage, thereby requiring management alternatives to control pest damage to crops. Retaining semi-natural habitats within agricultural landscapes is often assumed to be one such alternative, by contributing to boost natural enemy populations and reduce...

Assessing the spatio-temporal impact of agricultural intensification on species and communities is key for biodiversity conservation. Here, we investigated the seasonal effects of olive grove intensification at both local (farming practices and grove structural complexity) and landscape scale (land-cover diversity) on birds and bats, at species and...

Arthropod declines have been linked to agricultural intensification. However, information about the impacts of intensification is still limited for many crops, as is our understanding of the responses of different arthropod taxa and trophic groups, thus hindering the development of effective mitigation measures. We investigated the impacts of olive...

A data set of terrestrial, volant, and marine mammal occurrences in Portugal

Mammals are threatened worldwide, with ~26% of all species being included in the IUCN threatened categories. This overall pattern is primarily associated with habitat loss or degradation, and human persecution for terrestrial mammals, and pollution, open net fishing, climate change, and prey depletion for marine mammals. Mammals play a key role in...

Working in landscape ecology research often requires deriving metrics to understand the overall landscape connectivity and the importance of individual patches for maintaining the integrity of the landscape as a habitat supplier for a given species. The lack of available packages in R for this goal led us to create lconnect. This package has two ma...

A participatory monitoring programme of an exceptional modification of urban soundscapes during Covid-19 containment.

Forests can be modified by fine-scale disturbances such as those prompted by cattle grazing, but their impacts on biodiversity are far from being understood. Here, we investigate the response of insectivorous bats to cattle-driven forest disturbances, using a savanna-like Mediterranean agroforestry system, the Portuguese montado, as study system. I...

The effects of roads on bats are still a poorly documented issue. Most of the available research focuses on large and high-traffic highways, while low-medium-traffic roads are often assumed to have negligible impacts. However, small roads are ubiquitous in landscapes around the world. We examined the effects of these roads, as well as habitat types...

In the present work, the results of a bat sampling carried out at the Bay of Cádiz Natural Reserve (Cádiz, Spain) are presented. Bat surveys were performed in a total of 15 sampling points distributed along the bay of Cádiz, with the aim to record and idenify bat species occurring at the study site. At least four species belonging to four genera we...

ContextWhen modeling a species’ distribution, landscapes can alternatively be conceptualized following patch- or gradient-based approaches. However, choosing the most suitable conceptualization is difficult and methods for empirical validation are still lacking. Objectives To address the conditions under which a given conceptual model is more suita...

We hypothesized that it is possible to develop a regionally specific bat identification tool by fine-tuning a country wide call library.

Cadaval is a cave classified as an Important National Bat Roost, located in the Serra de Montejunto Natura 2000 site (PTCON0048), an area also classified as Protected Landscape (Paisagem Protegida da Serra de Montejunto). This roost holds a colony with a few thousand Miniopterus schreibersii during winter, and several hundred in spring and autumn....

Landscape homogenization caused by agricultural intensification has detrimental effects on several insectivorous bat species that provide valuable agricultural pest control services. To understand the mechanisms that promote bat persistence in intensively farmed landscapes, we investigated the patterns of species richness, flight and feeding activi...

Bats have very high daily energy demands and they often forage on freshwater habitats, such as ponds, to fulfil their needs. Ponds are highly profitable feeding areas but may provide different foraging opportunities for bats according to the type of ponds and landscape in the vicinity of these habitats. Here, we aim to test the influence of pond hy...

Despite continuous evolution, acoustic identification of bats is still a time consuming process with a significant amount of uncertainty. Often, a great amount of time and knowledge is needed just to overcome the existing variability of bat calls within and between species and even so, classifications at species level aren’t always achieved. On the...

Background: High Nature Value Farmlands (HNVF) harbor species dependent upon habitats maintained by low-intensity farming. Among HNVF, the montado (dehesa in Spain) is a multifunctional system declining due to droughts, pathogens, and increasing grazing pressure. Specifically, grazing pressure leads to compact soils and hinders natural tree regener...

The Mediterranean temporary ponds (MTP) are a priority habitat under the European Habitats Directive. This threatened habitat is seasonally flooded, alternating annually between a wet phase and a dry phase (in late spring, summer and autumn). We investigated the use of MTP by bats in the SW of Portugal and assessed how pond features, landscape vari...

Desenvolvimentos recentes nas metodologias de monitorização de morcegos utilizadas em Portugal, especialmente a introdção de estações de gravação automáticas, conduziram a um problema de análise devido à quantidade de dados obtida. Face a este problema propomos desenvolver um método automatizado de análise e classificação de pulsos de ecolocalizaçã...

Dada a existência de muitas espécies de morcegos em Portugal, algumas morfologicamente muito semelhantes, considerou-se útil fazer uma chave ilustrada que facilite a sua identificação. No entanto, a utilização desta chave não substitui a utilização de chaves de identificação mais completas, como “Dietz C. & von Helversen O. 2004. Illustrated Identi...

Bat fatalities are frequently associated with wind-farms. The methodology commonly used to estimate this mortality includes trials to determine the removal rate of carcasses by scavengers. Carcass removal trials took place in the Center-North region of Portugal during spring, summer and autumn of 2006 and 2007. A total of 413 carcasses of four diff...