Joao Honrado

CIBIO Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources | CIBIO · University of Porto

Invasive alien species are a major driver of global environmental change. Escalating globalization processes such as international trade and long-distance transport have contributed to an increase in the ecological, economic, and sociocultural impacts of biological invasions. As a result, their management has become an increasingly relevant topic o...

While data combinations from different sources proved to be a useful tool in species distribution models (SDMs), there is still much to explore on the usefulness and/or uncertainty of each input data source through the modelling process. We assessed the effects of uncertainty in SDMs using different data sources in both response (citizen-collected...

Regos A, Gonçalves J, Arenas-Castro S, Alcaraz-Segura D, Guisan A & Honrado JP (2022). Incorporating remotely sensed ecosystem functioning into species distribution models: limitations, advantages and future avenues. IALE 2022 European Landscape Ecology Congress Jul 11 – 15, 2022. Warsaw, Poland (Online).

Aim: A major source of uncertainty in the application of species distribution models (SDMs) is related to input data quality. Citizen-collected species occurrence data are often used for fitting SDMs when data from standardized and expert-supported surveys are unavailable. Macroclimate variables are much more commonly used as predictors in SDMs tha...

We approach the classification, by numerical methods, of semi-deciduous oak woodlands dominated by species of the Q.faginea and Q. canariensis taxonomic complexes in the West Mediterranean biogeographical Sub-Region. An initial typology is obtained from a subset of relevées by unsupervised classification (ISOPAM) and ordination constrained by both...

Biodiversity is declining globally at unprecedented rates. Ecological niche models (ENMs) are one of the most widely used toolsets to appraise global change impacts on biodiversity. Here, we identify a variety of advantages of incorporating remotely sensed ecosystem functioning attributes (EFAs) into ENMs. The development of ENMs that explicitly in...

How institutional stakeholders perceive the supply and demand of ecosystem services (ES) under distinct contexts determines which planning actions are deemed priority or not. Public officers play a crucial role in social-ecological management and decisionmaking processes, but there is a paucity of research exploring their perceptions on ES supply a...

The need to incorporate habitat dynamics into spatial conservation prioritization is increasingly recognized but often limited by the lack of available temporal data. To overcome this limitation, model-assisted monitoring has been advocated and developed over the last decade. However, predictive modelling often relies on static habitat features or...

The environmental and socio-economic impacts of wildfires are foreseen to increase across southern Europe over the next decades regardless of increasing resources allocated for fire suppression. This study aims to identify fire-smart management strategies that promote wildfire hazard reduction, climate regulation ecosystem service and biodiversity...

Os efeitos combinados do abandono dos usos tradicionais do solo e da mudança climática das últimas décadas têm levado a regimes de incêndios que ultrapassam a capacidade de extinção, com subsequente aumento no risco para a saúde, bem-estar social e económico, bem como para a salvaguarda dos recursos materiais, assim como um forte impacto nos ecossi...

Humans act as drivers for the introduction of non-native trees. Some non-native species may become invasive and cause undesirable impacts, thereby motivating targeted decision-making and management actions. Australian acacias (or wattles; genus Acacia subgenus Phyllodineae) have been introduced worldwide, offering both opportunities and risks for l...

The impact of wildfires is expected to increase across Southern Europe over the next decades, regardless of increasing fire-fighting efficiency and large resources allocated for fire suppression. Fire management policies will be challenged by severe fire regimes that could push current suppression capacity beyond a tipping point, resulting in a sub...

In their recent perspective paper, Pausas and Keeley (2019) present “wildfires as an ecosystem service”, summarizing both the evolutionary and socioecological benefits generated by wildfires to humankind. While we acknowledge the evolutionary and socioecological importance of fire, we argue that referring to (wild)fire as an “ecosystem service” is...

In this Special Issue dedicated to “Biodiversity Monitoring”, we are calling for innovative, integrative and multidisciplinary contributions aiming to improve the monitoring of biodiversity spatiotemporal change and of its drivers. We welcome studies covering biodiversity’s multiple dimensions in the terrestrial, freshwater and marine domains, espe...

Apresenta-se um estudo dos arrelvados naturais vivazes da bacia hidrográfica do rio Paiva, em particular das classes: 1) Festucetea indigestae; 2) Stipo giganteae-Agrostietea castellanae; 3) Molinio-Arrhenatheretea e 4) Nardetea. Com base em inventários realizados desde 2004, bem como em trabalhos publicados onde se estudou o território em causa, r...

Understanding how non-material benefits from ecosystems, known as cultural services, are shaped by non-native biota is paramount to manage biological invasions and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite recent advances, assessments of cultural services still lack an explicit temporal dimension, which is relevant for developing mo...

The conversion of natural and semi-natural forests into plantations is an increasing trend across European landscapes under abandonment. In Northwest Iberian Peninsula, current land use changes, namely neglected management (or even abandonment) of maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) and blue gum eucalypt (Eucalyptus globulus) stands by individual landow...

There is a 50 days' free access to our paper following this link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1YizM7szSIuod1 -------------------------------------------------------- This study explored and applied the concepts of Fire Regulation Capacity (FRC) and Fire Protection Ecosystem Service (FPES) in the assessment of the effects of landscape change in...

The ability of ecological niche models (ENMs) to produce robust predictions for different time frames (i.e. temporal transferability) may be hindered by a lack of ecologically relevant predictors. Model performance may also be affected by species traits, which may reflect different responses to processes controlling species distribution. In this st...

Identifying the key factors driving invasion processes is crucial for designing and implementing appropriate management strategies. In fact, the importance of (model-based) prevention and early detection was highlighted in the recent European Union regulation on Invasive Alien Species. Models based on abundance estimates for different age/size clas...

Ecosystems, in particular mountains, are facing strong socio-environmental pressures, which may jeopardize the provision of ecosystem services. Continuous monitoring of ecosystem services provision is therefore an important action in a context of environmental change. Within large scale assessments, satellite products are gathering strong attention...

The importance of environmental heterogeneity for biodiversity across scales is widely recognized in ecological theory and profusely supported by evidence. However, our understanding of the effects of spatiotemporal patterns of landscape functional properties on biodiversity is still rather limited. We examined the relationship between common passe...

Global environmental changes are rapidly affecting species’ distributions and habitat suitability worldwide, requiring a continuous update of biodiversity status to support effective decisions on conservation policy and management. In this regard, satellite-derived Ecosystem Functional Attributes (EFAs) offer a more integrative and quicker evaluati...

Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718322101

Ecosystem services indicators are important to measure the trends and state of ecosystem service delivery; with recent years seeing a wide indicator base being developed. Indicators are powerful tools to inform and improve the knowledge base on ecosystems and ecosystem services, which are useful for decision makers at any spatial scale for basing t...

Limitations in the assessment of cultural ecosystem services through quantifiable approaches have constrained our knowledge of how these services can be altered by drivers of global change, such as non-native tree species. Here, we address this caveat by evaluating the effects of non-native tree species, in comparison to native ones, on several cat...

The exhibition will be open from 8-12 January at the European Parliament. It will showcase images from Europe's latest generation of satellites, which invite you to explore how protected area managers and scientists are working together to protect some of Europe's most iconic mountain, desert, and coastal and marine protected areas. The event will...

We assessed the effects of landscape change on the climate regulation ecosystem service in a mountain river basin of Portugal, through the quantification, valuation and mapping of carbon sequestration and storage. The analyses were based on land use and land cover (LULC) changes that took place between 1990 and 2006 and on expected changes defined...

Protected Areas are a key component of nature conservation. They can play an important role in counterbalancing the impacts of ecosystem degradation. For an optimal protection of a Protected Area it is essential to account for the variables underlying the major Ecosystem Services an area delivers, and the threats upon them. Here we show that the pe...

List of mistakes made in the surveys and the ways used to correct them. Categories are Ecosystem Services (ES), Threats (Thr), and Ecosystem Types (ETy). The variable which was originally indicated (“between quotation marks”) is followed by our Remark on it (unless it may have been renamed). For the Actions taken: Split means that the term is split...

Harmonisation tables for all variables. (S2a) ecosystem services, (S2b) threats, and the classification of the variables into variables of biotic, abiotic or socio-economic (anthropogenic) nature, grey cells are variables indicated by PA managers. (PDF)

Example of the survey sent to PA managers. (PDF)

Example of the survey sent to, and answers from, the scientists working on protected areas. (PDF)

List of ecosystem types. Indicated for the transitional waters (TW) and the mountainous (MO) protected areas. (PDF)

Regime shift' has emerged as a key concept in the environmental sciences. The concept has roots in complexity science and its ecological applications, and is increasingly applied to intertwined social and ecological phenomena. Yet what exactly is a regime shift? We explore this question at three nested levels. First, we propose a broad, contingent,...

Forest management planning is a complex process of defining and coordinating forest management activities according to particular goals and objectives. Spatial heterogeneity, either resulting from environmental variability and disturbance or from societal variables (ownership, governance, preferences), contributes to increase the complexity of mana...

In the last decades, ecosystems services (ES) in the North of Portugal have been assessed typically for sets of ES addressed individually based on indicators (e.g., LULC) but also through mechanistic and non-mechanistic modeling (e.g., hydrological modeling, InVEST). Economic evaluation has been applied based mostly on the combination of ES supply...

The Iberian Cantabrian Atlantic biogeographical territory is a narrow strip of land, fallen L-shaped, which runs parallel to the coast from Pamplona (Spain) to near Aveiro (north Portugal), characterized by a wet and warm climate, with smooth winters and slight or absent drought in summer. Its relief is very varied and includes from coastal and inl...

Reservoirs often play an important role in mitigating water supply problems. However, the implications of climate change are not always considered in reservoir planning and management. This study aimed to address this challenge in the Alto Sabor watershed, northeast Portugal. The study analysed whether or not the shortage of water supply can be eff...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are today mainly used to predict the impacts of global environmental change on species distribution. However, temporal transferability of SDMs (i.e. the ability of accurately predict species distributions in time) is rarely evaluated prior to predicting species distribution to a different time. In this study, we t...

Invasive species are increasing in number, extent and impact worldwide. Effective invasion management has thus become a core socio-ecological challenge. To tackle this challenge, integrating spatial-temporal dynamics of invasion processes with modelling approaches is a promising approach. The inclusion of dynamic processes in such modelling framewo...

Freshwater ecosystems support biological communities with high species richness and conservation interest. However, these ecosystems are highly altered by human intervention and threatened worldwide, making them a priority in conservation planning and biodiversity monitoring. Bryophytes, including several conservation-interest taxa, are recognized...

There is growing interest in ecosystem disservices, i.e. the negative effects of ecosystems on humans. The focus on disservices has been controversial because of the lack of clarity on how to disentangle ecosystem services and disservices related to human wellbeing. A perspective that considers both services and disservices is needed to inform obje...

Invasion by non-native tree species is an environmental and societal challenge requiring predictive tools to assess invasion dynamics. The frequent scale mismatch between such tools and on-ground conservation is currently limiting invasion management. This study aimed to reduce these scale mismatches, assess the success of non-native tree invasion...

Environmental changes are driving rapid geographic shifts of suitable environmental conditions for species. These might survive by tracking those shifts, however successful responses will depend on the spatial distribution of suitable habitats (current and future) and on their connectivity. Most herptiles (i.e., amphibians and reptiles) have low di...

Background Attention has recently been drawn to the issue of transboundary invasions, where species introduced and naturalized in one country cross international borders and become problematic in neighbouring countries. Robust modelling frameworks, able to identify the environmental drivers of invasion and forecast the current and future potential...

Ongoing declines in biodiversity caused by global environmental changes call for adaptive conservation management, including the assessment of habitat suitability spatiotemporal dynamics potentially affecting species persistence. Remote sensing (RS) provides a wide-range of satellite-based environmental variables that can be fed into species distri...

Local ecosystem resilience to fire disturbance can be influenced by multiple factors, from topography and climate, to fire history and pre-fire structure of biotic communities. Here we investigated the factors affecting post-fire recovery of scrub vegetation in areas under Mediterranean climate affected by frequent fires. We hypothesized that, unde...

This study explored the effects of landscape change on the provision of ecosystem services in a mountain area in northern Portugal, in particular the trade-offs and synergies between services in 2 categories: provisioning and regulating. Services were assessed for 1990 and 2006 and projected for 2020 under 3 scenarios, both biophysically and econom...

Understanding the major ecological drivers that set transitions between large biogeographical regions constitute a major issue for ecologists. Marcescent forests are remnants of the mid-Tertiary vegetation, that act as biogeographic bridges between Temperate and Mediterranean areas in Southern Europe. These forests host taxa of both adjoining regio...

With the purpose of modelling and mapping the current soil organic carbon in the Sabor River's upper basin, we (i) collected and processed samples in 120 sampling units distributed in the study area according to an optimized sampling design; (ii) modelled the relationship between soil carbon and a set of variables based on multiple linear regressio...

Ensuring forest protection and the delivery of forest ecosystem services is a central aim of the European Union’s biodiversity strategy for 2020. Therefore, accurate modelling and mapping of ecosystem services as well as of biodiversity conservation value is an important asset in support of spatial planning and policy implementation. The objectives...

Agricultural abandonment is a major driver of change in rural landscapes. Assumed to provide beneficial results to the environment and the conservation of biota, rural abandonment triggers landscape and biotic homogenization and loss of valuable species and habitats. This article focuses on the ecological effects and conservation challenges of shif...

Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) consolidate information from varied biodiversity observation sources. Here we demonstrate the links between data sources, EBVs and indicators and discuss how different sources of biodiversity observations can be harnessed to inform EBVs. We classify sources of primary observations into four types: extensive a...

The most prominent factors inducing landscape change in the rural regions of south west Europe are depopulation and the associated socio-ecological modifications. The aim of this work was to assess the future implications of these processes on land use/land cover and biodiversity in northwest Iberia. To achieve our goal, we developed a virtual spat...

Climate and land-use changes are among the most relevant determinants of future persistence of rare plant species in rural landscapes. We analysed the structure of populations of a rare plant, Narcissus pseudonarcissus subsp. nobilis, and of their respective plant communities against several environmental variables (climate-, topography-, land-use-...

Ecological monitoring programmes are designed to detect and measure changes in biodiversity and ecosystems. In the case of biological invasions, they can contribute to anticipating risks and adaptively managing invaders. However, monitoring is often expensive because large amounts of data might be needed to draw inferences. Thus, careful planning i...

Question Can very high-resolution colour orthophotography and digital surface models (DSMs) from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) be effectively used for assessment of habitat extent and condition in fine-scale disturbance-dependent mosaics? Location Serra de Arga mountain range, a Natura 2000 protected site in the NW region of Portugal where dra...

The importance of monitoring biodiversity to detect and understand changes throughout time and to inform management is increasingly recognized. Monitoring schemes should be globally unified, spatially integrated across scales, long term, and cost-efficient.We propose a framework to design optimized multispecies-targeted monitoring networks over lar...

To identify the extent and true underlying driving forces is essential to understand processes behind biological invasions and generate policy initiatives contrasting invasion threats to biodiversity. Woody invasion by Acacia dealbata is a major process occurring and forecasted in Portuguese mountain landscape (Fernandes et al. 2014). This study tr...