Federico Morelli

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Aim: The urbanization process can lead to specialist species being replaced by generalist species in space and time, increasing similarity among bird communities, a phenomennon termed biotic homogenization, directly related to taxonomic and functional diversity. However, the effects of urbanization on phylogenetic diversity remain unclear. Our stud...

Common cuckoo Cuculus canorus is a charismatic bird species with a dominant presence in human culture: from folklore legends to nowadays there is evidence of cuckoos being a prime candidate as a surrogate of bird diversity. Recent studies demonstrated that the cuckoo can predict hotspots of taxonomic diversity and functional diversity of bird commu...

Road and railway networks are pervasive elements of all environments, which have expanded intensively over the last century in all European countries. These transportation infrastructures have major impacts on the surrounding landscape, representing a threat to biodiversity. Roadsides and railways may function as corridors for dispersal of alien sp...

Urban environments cover vast areas with a high density of humans and their dogs and cats causing problems for exploitation of new resources by wild animals. Such resources facilitate colonization by individuals with a high level of neophilia predicting that urban animals should show more neophilia than rural conspecifics. We provided bird-feeders...

The importance of biodiversity conservation is well recognized, and the loss of biodiversity is particularly evident in highly urbanized areas. On the other hand, green spaces inside cities, as parks, can provide a resource for maintaining and increasing biodiversity, especially for bird species. However, only a few studies have addressed the effec...

Global Roadkill Data: a dataset on terrestrial vertebrate mortality caused by collision with vehicles (Supplementary information)

Roadkill is widely recognized as one of the primary negative effects of roads on many wildlife species and also has socioeconomic impacts when they result in accidents. A comprehensive dataset of roadkill locations is essential to evaluate the factors contributing to roadkill risk and to enhance our comprehension of its impact on wildlife populatio...

Agricultural intensification is a leading cause of biodiversity loss worldwide. However, the traditional agroecosystems are often associated with high avian diversity because of their landscape heterogeneity, offering available niches to different bird species. Here, we focused on the temporal changes in taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic dive...

This study investigates the changes in population size, distribution, and habitat preferences of the Eurasian magpie Pica pica in Zielona Góra over 23 years, emphasising the effects of urbanisation and habitat transformation. A comprehensive survey conducted in 2022 identified 953 magpie pairs, with an average density of 8.8 pairs/km² across the cu...

Environmental change is increasing worldwide and many animal species face anthropogenic threats, especially diet specialists. Yet the degree to which specialist species are currently impacted by environmental change remains poorly understood. We examine how anthropogenic pressures impact dietary specialist species. We calculated indices of diet spe...

Aim Specialist species are characterised as species with a narrow niche and, thus, vulnerable to environmental changes and disturbance. Understanding the distribution of specialists is important for developing proactive conservation strategies. Although China is among the countries with the highest diversity of mammals, no previous studies have exp...

Urban parks and cemeteries constitute hot spots of bird diversity in urban areas. However, the seasonal dynamics of their bird communities have been scarcely explored at large scales. This study aims to analyze the drivers of urban bird assemblage seasonality in urban parks and cemeteries comparing assemblages during breeding and non-breeding seaso...

The Polish Roadkill Observation System (PROS) database, a large dataset of roadkills collected between 2000 and 2022 in Poland, was used. We calculated the total length for each road type and the main type of environment around the wildlife-vehicle collision (WVC) event, in a grid of 10 × 10 km (e.g., spatial unit). We explored the spatial congruen...

The common cuckoo Cuculus canorus is an obligate brood parasite of many Eurasian bird species that exploit the parental care of their hosts. Although only females lay eggs in nests of passerine hosts, male and female cuckoos should cooperate to have a success in nest parasitism. Many bird species mobbing cuckoos as an element of deterrence of cucko...

Given global changes and the loss of ecosystem services, it is crucial to assess the effects of landscape characteristics on ecosystem service distribution for sustainable territory management. Italy’s diverse landscapes present an opportunity to study this effect. This study identified optimal elevation and landscape heterogeneity ranges that opti...

Diurnal roosts are vital to bats and growing evidence suggests that bats increasingly exploit synanthropic structures, such as buildings. The use of synanthropic roosts (SRs) has been explained as a consequence of the decreased availability of natural roosts imposed by habitat destruction, although growing evidence suggests that the use of SRs may...

Background The expansion of human activities in their many forms increases the frequency, diversity, and scale of human-wildlife interactions. One such negative form is the expansion of road infrastructure, causing road kill and traffic-related noise as well as habitat loss and fragmentation. Even so, habitats around road infrastructure are attract...

Our objective was to estimate the effect of road mortality on Palearctic reptilian biodiversity. Based on a bibliographic search of 354 references we compiled roadkill data for 138 reptile species in the Palearctic. We searched journals and other repositories, herpetological travel blogs and regional scientific/natural history literature using keyw...

We extensively reviewed scientific literature and extracted a large dataset with roadkill events for reptile species. We examined 300 articles from 33 European countries, gathering 1688 records of reptiles killed by vehicle traffic. A total of 125 taxa were found documented as roadkill (100 native and 25 exotic species). We calculated each species'...

The alarming decline of amphibians, sometimes marked by sudden extinctions, underlines the urgent need for increased conservation efforts. Conservationists recognize that more action, particularly the setting of national targets, is needed to ensure the future persistence and recovery of species and habitats. Protecting habitats that harbor evoluti...

Aim Understanding the factors determining the size of a species distribution range is crucial to preventing the extinction of vulnerable species, particularly specialist species. Previous research has shown that climate and various traits of a species significantly affect its distribution range size. However, the impact of avian dietary specializat...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and respective shutdowns dramatically altered human activities, potentially changing human pressures on urban-dwelling animals. Here, we use such COVID-19-induced variation in human presence to evaluate, across multiple temporal scales, how urban birds from five countries changed their tolerance towa...

Winter is a critical period for the survival of local bird species in temperate regions. Some wintering birds may rely on transient food, such as that provided at birdfeeders, but bird communities around birdfeeders may also attract predators. However, these effects of birdfeeders on interspecific interactions between birds and their predators rema...

Urban areas are known to have high levels of noise pollution, which can impact an animal’s antipredator behavior. Noise can either distract the animal or mask the sounds of a predator, increasing the animal’s vulnerability to predation. However, the prey may increase vigilance in noisier environments, thus reducing energy and time spent on other ac...

Amphibians are the most endangered taxa among vertebrates, and they face many threats during their complex life cycles. the species' life history traits and occurrence database help understand species responses against ecological factors. Consequently, the species-level-trait database has gained more prominence in recent years as a useful tool for...

When encountering an approaching predator, prey often must decide on an optimal distance for escape, measured as flight initiation distance (FID). As a fundamental behavioural indicator, FID has been widely measured in many species, and many biological or environmental factors have been found to be associated with FID. However, the effect of flock...

Urbanization alters avian communities, generally lowering the number of species and contemporaneously increasing their functional relatedness, leading to biotic homogenization. Urbanization can also negatively affect the phylogenetic diversity of species assemblages, potentially decreasing their evolutionary distinctiveness. We compare species asse...

Matching the timing of spring arrival to the breeding grounds with hosts and prey is crucial for migratory brood parasites such as cuckoos. Previous studies have focused mostly on phenological mismatch between a single cuckoo species and its hosts but information regarding climate-driven mismatch between multiple sympatric cuckoo species and their...

Simple Summary In this study, we explored the territorial displays of Little Owls in urban and rural areas. Specifically, we compared the size of territories between urban and rural landscapes, investigating the main characteristics (e.g., land use composition, altitude) that characterize territories of the species in both types of landscapes. Over...

The biodiversity impacts of agricultural deforestation vary widely across regions. Previous efforts to explain this variation have focused exclusively on the landscape features and management regimes of agricultural systems, neglecting the potentially critical role of ecological filtering in shaping deforestation tolerance of extant species assembl...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are numerical tools that combine species occurrence (or abundance) data with environmental variables, to predict the species’ distribution spatially. SDMs are increasingly used for purposes of conservation planning and management of ecosystems. The model performance can be measured as the goodness-of-fit (GOF), wh...

Urbanization is one of the main current drivers of the global biodiversity loss. Cities are usually developed in a gradient between land-sharing (low density housing with small and fragmented green areas) and land-sparing areas (high density housing with large and non-fragmented green patches) depending on the spatial organization of urban attribut...

Quantifying biodiversity trends in economically developed countries, where depopulation, associated secondary succession, and climate warming are ongoing, provides insights for global biodiversity conservation in the 21st century. However, few studies have assessed the impacts of secondary succession and climate warming on species’ population trend...

We test a forecasting strategy to identify potential hotspots of amphibian roadkill, combining the spatial distribution of amphibians, their relative risk of collision with vehicles and data on road density in Spain. We extracted a large dataset from studies reporting road casualties of 39 European amphibian species and then estimated the ‘relative...

Introduction: Bird populations reflect the influence of major environmental changes, and the analysis of their long-term population trends concerning species-specific ecological traits can provide insight into biologically relevant impacts of such changes. In this respect, nest site is a particularly informative trait because ground-nesting bird sp...

Los espacios verdes urbanos cumplen un rol fundamental para la conservación de aves en ciudades. Aunque el rol de los parques urbanos para conservar la diversidad de aves ha sido analizado a escala global, el análisis del rol de los cementerios ha sido más escaso. El objetivo del trabajo fue describir y comparar la dinámica estacional de diferentes...

Simple Summary Many corvid species have adapted to live in urban regions. Studying their habitat needs and the similarities among them would allow us to predict species’ responses to global changes. Such studies have not been widely done on generalist species capable of surviving in different environments. Here, we studied the habitat needs and spa...

Urbanization affects avian community composition in European cities, increasing biotic homogenization. Anthropic pollution (such as light at night and noise) is among the most important drivers shaping bird use in urban areas, where bird species are mainly attracted by urban greenery. In this study, we collected data on 127 breeding bird species at...

Most ecological studies use remote sensing to analyze broad‐scale biodiversity patterns, focusing mainly on taxonomic diversity in natural landscapes. One of the most important effects of high levels of urbanization is species loss (i.e., biotic homogenization). Therefore, cost‐effective and more efficient methods to monitor biological communities'...

The escape behaviour, measured as flight initiation distance (FID; the distance at which individuals take flight when approached by a potential predator, usually a human in the study systems), is a measure widely used to study fearfulness and risk-taking in animals. Previous studies have shown significant differences in the escape behaviour of bird...

Capsule Bird species richness was highest in forest and urban habitat types, lower in grassland and wetland, and lowest in cropland. Aims To investigate bird species richness patterns across different habitat types in Czechia, Central Europe. Methods Data from a national breeding bird monitoring scheme in Czechia, based on mapping of positions of...

Para huir de depredadores, las aves urbanas pueden elegir entre dos estrategias de escape: correr o volar. Estos comportamientos de huida presentan distintos costos para el individuo, teniendo el primero un menor gasto energético pero mayor riesgo de depredación y viceversa. Sin embargo, los factores que afectan la selección de una u otra estrategi...

Background Urbanization will increase in the next decades, causing the loss of green areas and bird diversity within cities. There is a lack of studies at a continental scale analyzing the relationship between urban green areas, such as parks and cemeteries, and bird species richness in the Neotropical region. Bird diversity-environment relationshi...

Quantifying intraspecific and interspecific trait variability is critical to our understanding of biogeography, ecology and conservation. But quantifying such variability and understanding the importance of intraspecific and interspecific variability remain challenging. This is especially true of large geographic scales as this is where the differe...

Risk-taking in birds is often measured as the flight initiation distance (FID), the distance at which individuals take flight when approached by a potential predator (typically a human). The ecological factors that affect avian FID have received great attention over the past decades and meta-analyses and comparative analyses have shown that FID is...

Species richness is a widely used proxy for patterns of biodiversity variation in metacommunities. However, deeper analyses require additional metrics, such as the occupancy-frequency distributions (SOFD) of different local communities. The SOFD patterns indicate the number of shared species between study sites; therefore, they can provide new insi...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has dramatically altered human activities, potentially relieving human pressures on urban-dwelling animals. Here, we evaluated whether birds from five cities in five countries (Czech Republic - Prague, Finland - Rovaniemi, Hungary - Budapest, Poland - Poznan, and Australia - Melbourne) changed their...

Current rates of land use are driving temporal changes in avian communities. Thus, it is essential to properly designate and manage protected areas since they mitigate the adverse effects of temporal changes on species populations. By using common bird monitoring data in Czechia from two periods (2005/2006 and 2014/2015), we calculated two indices...

Variation in bird community composition across habitats may be reflected by changes in species’ ecological characteristics. By their comparison between habitats, we can learn information about the factors underlying these changes. With this purpose, we used data from a nation-wide breeding bird monitoring scheme surveying birds in 15 habitat types...

Species subjected to more variable environments should have greater phenotypic plasticity than those that are more restricted to specific habitat types leading to the expectation that migratory birds should be relatively more plastic than resident birds. We tested this comparatively by studying variation in flight initiation distance (FID), a well-...

Habitat overlap occurs when two species co-exist in the same habitat and utilise the same resources. Using common bird monitoring data in Czech Republic from 2015 and 2016, we compared the affinities of five Columbidae species regarding land use types. Moreover, we analysed the effects of land use types and land use heterogeneity on five species di...

Bird counting inevitably suffers from imperfect detection, which varies across species, habitats, period of the day, and seasons. Although various modeling techniques have recently been developed to account for this phenomenon, the biological basis of natural variation in detection remains insufficiently known. This study examined the bird species’...

Protected areas are a relevant conservation tool at our disposal, especially for developing management strategies of natural habitats. However, explicit tests at large spatial scales about its effectivity protecting different components of biodiversity are still rare. This study explored the spatial matching between the distribution of three compon...

Urban and suburban areas are among the fastest-growing land-use types globally, reducing and fragmenting natural habitats for many animal species and making human-wildlife interactions more common. However, cities also create habitat for several species considered urban tolerant or urban exploiter species. Additionally, the environmental characteri...

Aim We assessed the spatial distribution of four different types of avian specialization throughout Europe, identifying landscape features associated with specialization and quantifying where the Natura 2000 network intersects with areas of high avian specialization. Location Europe. Time period Present day. Taxa studied European breeding birds....

Includes: Figure S1. Linear regression plot between FID and initial distance (A), FID and alarm distance (B) and alarm distance and initial distance (C) in birds and mammals of Jhalana Forest reserve, Jaipur, India. Figure S2. The differences between the level of noise produced by the two type of cars used in the experiment (measured in dB), with M...

Context: Anthropogenic sounds are pollution that is not always evaluated in the environment in general and near wildlife in particular. Non-electric Off-Road Vehicles (ORV) are used in most wildlife reserves of India for ecotourism purposes in the form of wildlife viewing safaris. Aims: We hypothesized that the e-vehicles would allow a closer appr...

Europe is an urbanized continent characterized by a long history of human-wildlife interactions. This study aimed to assess the effects of specific elements of urbanization and urban pollution on complementary avian diversity metrics, to provide new insights on the conservation of urban birds. Our study recorded 133 bird species at 1624 point coun...

Actions taken against the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically affected many aspects of human activity, giving us a unique opportunity to study how wildlife responds to the human-induced rapid environmental changes. The wearing of face masks, widely adopted to prevent pathogen transmission, represents a novel element in many parts of the world where...

Climate and land use are rapidly changing environmental conditions. Behavioral responses to such global perturbations can be used to incorporate interspecific interactions into predictive models of population responses to global change. Flight initiation distance (FID) reflects antipredator behaviour defined as the distance at which an individual t...

Simple Summary The aim of this study was to estimate the Magpie population and to give a detailed characterization of nest site selection in a medium size city in Poland (Gorzów Wlkp.) in the XXI century. We also focused on the analysis of nest site selection along an urban gradient. The average density of Magpies was 5.5 pairs/km² (min = 0, max =...

Sacred groves in Greece are usually forest remnants with large trees around chapels, protected through centuries by Orthodox religion. We examined the comparative ecological value of 20 oak-dominated sacred groves vs managed oakwoods, in terms of their habitat characteristics and avian communities (passerines and wood-peckers). Sacred groves have m...

The main objective of this long‐term study (1978–2016) was to find the underlying factors behind the declining trends of eider Somateria mollissima in the Baltic/Wadden Sea. Specifically, we aimed at quantifying the bottom‐up effect of nutrients, through mussel stocks, on reproduction and abundance of eider, and the top‐down effects caused by white...

The emergence of infectious diseases is reviewed highlighting the potential role played by main environmental an-thropogenic disturbances as, deforestation, land-use change, human-induced climate change, biodiversity loss and the illegal wildlife trade. Ultimately, it is plausible that the human impact on the biosphere could be the root cause of th...

Cities currently harbour more than half of the world's human population and continued urban expansion replaces natural landscapes and increases habitat fragmentation. The impacts of urbanisation on biodiversity have been extensively studied in some parts of the world, but there is limited information from South Asia, despite the rapid expansion of...

Collisions of vehicles with animals are an increasing problem, and due to the loss of animal, as well as human, life is an active topic in applied ecology. One of the best-known mitigation methods to avoid collisions is the provision of dedicated road warning signs. However, due to changes in landscape, in the densities of cars and animals, and to...

Aim As urban areas continue to expand, it is increasingly important to quantify species‐specific responses to urban environments, and how these change across the full annual cycle. Our objective was to quantify urban tolerance for North American birds across the time. We tested (a) whether intra‐annual variability of urban tolerance differed betwee...

Birds with plumage colour aberrations are of interest to both the general public and scientists. However, due to their rarity in nature, information on the presence of colour aberrations is rarely found in the peer‐reviewed literature. Exploration of public observations using modern information technologies such as Internet‐based search engines cou...

Ecologically specialist species are more prone to extinction than generalist species, yet the global distribution and conservation of ecological specialism is poorly understood. Here, we show that the global distribution of avian dietary specialization is roughly congruent with overall bird species richness for resident and breeding species, as wel...

Road networks alter the landscapes, increasing the ecosystem fragmentation and for this reason are associated with a significant impact in biodiversity. The main ecological effects of road networks on wildlife are related to a) habitat loss, b) direct disturbance by noise and artificial light, and especially by c) artificial barrier to animal movem...

Due to their falling cost, unmanned aerial vehicles, often called drones, are increasingly used as a tool in bird research and conservation. However, behavioural responses of birds to flying drones are still not well understood, for example do birds recognize drones as predators, as benign, or as neutral elements? How do they react to drones? We an...

Understanding the processes shaping the composition of assemblages in response to disturbance events is crucial for preventing ongoing biodiversity loss in forest ecosystems. However, studies of forest biodiversity responses to disturbance typically analyze immediate or short-term impacts only, while studies relating long-term disturbance history t...

Through an extensive literature review and using a large dataset collected from several European studies, we explored the frequency of occurrence of road bird casualties. First, we modelled the inter-specific variation in roadkill’ frequency across the avian phylogeny, testing for phylogenetic signal. Then, we explored the association between frequ...

In this study, we propose a novel strategy for identifying potential hotspots of avian roadkills in Europe. The proposed approach combines information about the spatial distribution of bird species at a comparatively higher risk of roadkill with data on road density. First, using a large dataset collected from several European studies and reports,...

The impact of veterinary medical products (VMPs) on dung beetles has been thoroughly investigated. However, less is known about the ecological consequences for the ecosystem processes performed by this fauna, especially in relation to functional diversity. We explored the impacts of the long-term use of VMPs on dung beetles from a functional standp...

Generalist species – with their wide niche breadths – are often associated with urban environments, while specialist species are likely to be most at‐risk of increasing urbanization processes. But studies which quantify the relationship between trait specialization (i.e. niche breadth) and urban tolerance are generally methodologically limited, wit...

The sand lizard (Lacerta agilis) is a common species in Europe that inhabits a wide range of habitats, including anthropogenic environments. It is a frequent carrier of common ticks (Ixodes ricinus), which poses a severe threat to the lizards' health. We determined the living space used by lizards in a rapidly changing environment and ascertained t...

This study aimed to investigate the match between breeding bird communities’ potential resilience and projections of climate change in Europe. Here we identified European regions with the most substantial projected impacts of climate change based on Δ temperature and Δ precipitation in the next 60 years, assessing the overlap with maps of potential...

• Brood parasitism is a breeding strategy adopted by many species of cuckoos across the world. This breeding strategy influences the evolution of life histories of brood parasite species. • In this study, we tested whether the degree on diet specialization is related to the breeding strategy in cuckoo species, by comparing brood parasite and nonpar...

Urbanization is affecting avian biodiversity across the planet, and potentially increasing species vulnerability to climate. Identifying the resilience of urban bird communities to climate change is critical for making conservation decisions. This study explores the pattern in bird communities across nine European cities and examines the projected...