Dina Zografou

University of Ioannina | UOI · Department of Biological Applications and Technologies

Global patterns of land-use change have led conservationists to rely increasingly on human-dominated landscapes for biodiversity conservation. One set of such landscapes, military training areas, hold promise for conservation as they are widespread and often harbor rare habitat types. However, military training areas are often heavily impacted and...

The European protected-area network will cease to be efficient for biodiversity conservation, particularly in the Mediterranean region, if species are driven out of protected areas by climate warming. Yet, no empirical evidence of how climate change influences ecological communities in Mediterranean nature reserves really exists. Here, we examine l...

Mountains are complex ecosystems supporting a great variety of taxa. Here, we explored the diversity patterns of arthropods in two mountains, pinpointing the spatial scale that accounts most for overall diversity variation, using an additive partitioning framework. Butterflies and Orthoptera were sampled in Rodopi (2012) and Grammos (2013) mountain...

1. Insects undergo phenological change at different rates, showing no consistent trend between habitats, time periods, species or groups. Understanding how and why this variability occurs is crucial. 2. Phenological patterns of butterflies and Orthoptera were analysed using a novel approach of standardised major axis (SMA) analysis. It was investi...

Greece is a European hotspot for Orthoptera (378 species), yet it has been scarcely explored. We investigated the distribution and habitat preferences of the species of two endemic Orthoptera genera, Parnassiana and Oropodisma, in the montane ecosystems of central Greece. We conducted field surveys from 2021 to 2024 in 174 sites across seven mounta...

Since the first European observation in 2015 of Erthesina fullo (Thunberg, 1783) (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Pentatomidae: Halyini) in Albania in the region of Durrës and Tirana, observations have remained limited to this 40 km wide region. The number of observations of E. fullo increased significantly in this region in 2023 and 2024. For the first ti...

Orthoptera species are vulnerable to extinction on a global scale. Greece hosts 35% (380 species) of the European Orthoptera fauna with a high degree of endemic (37%) and threatened species (37%). We sampled 46 plots (100 m ² ) to investigate the distribution and ecological requirement of two Greek mountain endemic and red‐listed species: Parnassia...

In response to the ongoing global extinction, conservationists must prioritize future conservation investments to ensure that such measures are biologically effective and economically viable. To propose an effective conservation plan for Orthoptera assemblages on Cyprus Island, we introduce the Standardized Conservation Index (StCI), a biodiversity...

Greece is a European hotspot for Orthoptera (378 species), yet it has been scarcely explored. We investigated the diversity patterns of Orthoptera and the ecological mechanisms shaping them by sampling 15 sites (30 plots of 1ha) across five habitats in Mount Mitsikeli, a Natura 2000 site. The mountain is deemed rich (0.4 species/km 2), hosting 34 s...

ENGLISH: Citizen science is an emerging field worldwide that connects science to society. Apollo is the first national voluntary butterfly biomonitoring scheme in Greece, aiming to protect butterflies and their habitats, educate citizens in species identification and monitoring, promote science and disseminate the knowledge generated to decision-ma...

Variation in pollinator foraging behavior can influence pollination effectiveness, community diversity, and plant-pollinator network structure. Although effects of interspecific variation have been widely documented, studies of intraspecific variation in pollinator foraging are relatively rare. Sex-specific differences in resource use are a strong...

Climate change alters organismal performance via shifts in temperature. However, we know little about the relative fitness impacts of climate variability and how cold-adapted ectotherms mediate these effects. Here, we advance the field of climate change biology by directly testing for species performance, considering the effects of different therma...

Diverse taxa have undergone phenological shifts in response to anthropogenic climate change. While such shifts generally follow predicted patterns, they are not uniform, and interspecific variation may have important ecological consequences. We evaluated relationships among species’ phenological shifts (mean flight date, duration of flight period),...

2020. Stable generalist species anchor a dynamic pollination network. Ecosphere 11(8): Abstract. The application of complex network theory to community ecology has enabled quantification of interactions among large suites of species and clarified patterns of community structure across systems. Past analyses, however, have assumed that ecological ne...

Abstract Inferring species' responses to climate change in the absence of long‐term time series data is a challenge, but can be achieved by substituting space for time. For example, thermal elevational gradients represent suitable proxies to study phenological responses to warming. We used butterfly data from two Mediterranean mountain areas to tes...

Maintaining species turnover across habitats is essential for biodiversity conservation. Thus, identifying drivers of community variation is important for conservation strategies. Here, we examine spider community variation along a Mediterranean climatic gradient in Greece, characterised by a mosaic of vegetation. We quantified spider community com...

As grassland ecosystems transform globally due to anthropogenic pressures, improvements in our understanding of the effect of management on rare and threatened species in such landscapes has become urgent. Although prescribed fire is a very efficient tool for habitat restoration and endangered species management on fire-adapted ecosystems, the spec...

In this study we investigate the environmental factors influencing butterfly communities and evaluate the Natura 2000 network’s effectiveness in representing butterfly species richness and abundance, taking as a case study the island of Cyprus. We sampled butterflies and 11 environmental factors in 60 randomly selected sites across four 500-m eleva...

Red Lists are very valuable tools in nature conservation at global, continental and (sub-) national scales. In an attempt to prioritise conservation actions for European butterflies, we compiled a database with species lists and Red Lists of all European countries, including the Macaronesian archipelagos (Azores, Madeira and Canary Islands). In tot...

Grasslands have undergone extensive transformation globally from agricultural intensification and residential development, resulting in drastically reduced habitat area available to native butterfly populations. However, even fragmented semi-natural grasslands within an agricultural matrix can often support butterflies, as long as disturbance is fr...

Our understanding of arthropod responses to environmental pressures is limited, especially for the poorly studied Mediterranean region. In the light of likely further environmental change and the need for protocols for rapid biodiversity assessment, we measured how the abundance and species richness of two taxa, ground spiders and Orthoptera, belon...

The National Park of Dadia in NE Greece (Thrace) was established as a nature reserve in 1980, mainly due to its great diversity in birds of prey. Since then many studies have taken place, focusing on other birds, reptiles, amphibians and some invertebrates (grasshoppers, beetles and butterflies), but up to now none was conducted on spiders. The aim...

Various studies document the ecological impacts of climate change on many species and environments, ecosystem processes and species interactions (e.g. the timing of host-plant flowering and butterflies’ phenology). However, what is usually overlooked is that populations drift even in the absence of environmental stress. Ecological drift can lead to...

The present paper studies butterfly, grasshopper and vascular plant communities in ten seasonally flooded grasslands with different anthropogenic disturbance regimes (NW Greece). Disturbance intensity was assessed on the basis of disturbance frequency and type (grazing, mowing, trampling, constructions). The distribution patterns of butterflies are...

Context This study investigates post-fire natural regeneration of Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis) forests at Ilia region (Peloponnesus, Greece) following the catastrophic fire of 2007. Aims The objective of this study is the prediction of P. halepensis post-fire regeneration at a regional scale through an integrated geographic information systems (G...

We tested the surrogate value of butterflies, red-listed butterflies and grasshoppers for each other in terms of diversity patterns congruence and complementarity at a site in the NATURA 2000 network. Grammos Mountain is proposed as a new Prime Butterfly Area for Greece: it supports a total of 56 grasshopper species and 112 butterfly species, 24 of...