Lluís BrotonsCREAF Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications | CREAF · Ecoland lab
Lluís Brotons
PhD. Biological Sciences University of Barcelona
Ecoland integrates research at CSIC-CREAF, CTFC and ICO on biodiversity, global and landscape ecology and monitoring.
About
524
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Introduction
Unravelling the causes of past changes in biodiversity patterns under environmental change (land abandonment, landscape fragmentation, climate change, agricultural intensification and changes in disturbance regimes such as fires) allows the critical and adequate calibration and development of models of future ecosystem response to further change. CSIC researcher at InForest JRU (CTFC-CREAF).
Additional affiliations
December 2014 - present
December 2014 - present
January 2014 - December 2016
Publications
Publications (524)
Extreme fire severity patterns driven by climate change have deep consequences on vegetation, subsequent fire regimes and have consequences on the effectiveness of extinction. In this work, we aimed to determine if
extreme fire severity defined as the 90th percentile of RdNBR has changed in Spain in the last 3 decades, if extreme fire severity pat...
To achieve the goals of the 2030 Global Biodiversity Framework, the European Biodiversity Strategy, and the EU Green Deal, biodiversity monitoring is critical. Monitoring efforts in Europe, however, suffer from gaps and biases in taxonomy, spatial coverage, and temporal resolution, resulting in fragmented and disconnected data. To assess user and p...
Background
Recent extreme wildfire events in countries with high investments in fire extinction indicate that strategies focusing exclusively on fire suppression are ineffective. Although upgrading analytical capacities and technological-based solutions in emergency management is needed, shifting from fire suppression to strategic fire management i...
This report discusses the potential synergies of the EBVs developed in each showcase, in conjunction with existing environmental policies, for a comprehensive assessment of European biodiversity.
The combination of the 'Remains' and 'Biomod2' R packages facilitates access to a suite of modeling functions to explore prescribed fire planning, wildfire risk management and biodiversity conservation under land-use policy scenarios. This R-based modelling framework increase capacity building beyond academia and support policy-and decision-making...
Exploring new approaches and methodologies to characterize species distribution dynamics, instead of solely relying on static spatial patterns, should be a priority for species distribution modelling research. Dynamic occupancy models (here, ‘dynocc models') are a promising tool to capture temporal patterns of distribution change but their spatial...
Observations are key to understanding the state of nature, the drivers of biodiversity loss and the impacts on ecosystem services and ultimately on people. Many EU policies and initiatives call for unbiased, integrated and regularly updated data on biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, biodiversity monitoring efforts are spatially and tempo...
In Europe, population estimates of breeding birds are produced nationally and are periodically compiled at EU or pan-European scales. Until now, no other source was available to explore the robustness of these estimates. In this study, we compared population sizes reported in the latest edition of the European Red List of Birds (ERLoB) with those p...
This deliverable shows, using farmland birds as a demonstrative case study, how the existing European network of bird monitoring schemes could be used to regularly update the distribution of terrestrial breeding birds across the whole of EU and neighbouring countries. In addition, it shows how changes in distribution could be assessed on frequent i...
EuropaBON EBV workflow templates
The information provided here represents the EBV workflow templates collected during the EuropaBON online workshop on Essential Biodiversity
Variable (EBV) workflows from 22–24 February 2023. The templates were designed to capture comprehensive descriptions about the three
workflow components (data collection and s...
The information represents the EBV workflow templates collected during the EuropaBON online workshop on Essential Biodiversity Variable (EBV) workflows from 22–24 February 2023.
The templates were designed to capture comprehensive descriptions about the three workflow components (data collection and sampling, data integration, and modelling) that...
Agricultural intensification not only increases food production but also drives widespread biodiversity decline. Increasing landscape heterogeneity has been suggested to increase biodiversity across habitats, while increasing crop heterogeneity may support biodiversity within agroecosystems. These spatial heterogeneity effects can be partitioned in...
Future dynamics of biological invasions are highly uncertain because they depend on multiple social–ecological drivers. We used a scenario‐based approach to explore potential management options for invasive species in Europe. During two workshops involving a multidisciplinary team of experts, we developed a management strategy arranged into 19 goal...
The latest report on the state of nature in Europe (2013–2018) shows that biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate, with most protected species and habitats in poor condition. Despite an increasing volume of collected biodiversity information, urgent action is needed to integrate biodiversity data and knowledge to improve conservation efforts....
Mapping pressures to species is key to identify where biodiversity is at risk and providing relevant information to direct conservation actions. Decision-making to minimise pressures requires the determination of specific target actions at a high level of detail. However, the trade-off between cost and effort to generate this information often lead...
Mapping the drivers of change that pose negative pressures or threats to biodiversity can help to identify where biodiversity is most threatened and can be used to determine priority sites to target conservation actions. Overlapping drivers of change maps with distribution maps of sensitive species provides valuable information to identify where an...
Species niches may impact population and community stability by influencing average population sizes and species richness, however, niche-based approaches are rarely applied when studying stability in natural communities. Here we utilise a niche-based approach to link niche characteristics to community stability in 140 European butterfly communitie...
Biological invasions pose significant threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Removal of introduced species is most successful when detected early. We evaluate the effectiveness of passive acoustics combined with automated recognition in detecting the invasive American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus). We applied this technique to two...
Natural pest and weed regulation are essential for agricultural production, but the spatial distribution of natural enemies within crop fields and its drivers are mostly unknown. Using 28 datasets comprising 1204 study sites across eight Western and Central European countries, we performed a quantitative synthesis of carabid richness, activity dens...
Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, nature's contributions to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) envisions a world living in harmony with nature by 2050, with 23 intermediate targets to be achieved by 2030. However, aligning international policy and local implementation of effective actions can be challenging. Using steppe birds, one of the most threatened vertebrate groups in Europe,...
In flammable ecosystems, forest dynamics are affected by fire suppression, climate change and changes in land use that cause the frequency and intensity of fires to diverge from natural fire regimes. Although afforestation provides new habitats for forest species, fire can reverse its benefits by penalizing forest species. Shorter fire recurrence m...
Climate change has been associated with both latitudinal and elevational shifts in species’ ranges. The extent, however, to which climate change has driven recent range shifts alongside other putative drivers remains uncertain. Here, we use the changing distributions of 378 European breeding bird species over 30 years to explore the putative driver...
Modelling landscape dynamics is crucial for assessing the potential effectiveness of upgraded land management. In fire-prone regions, wildfires play a critical role in shaping landscapes, and land-use and fire suppression policies strongly influence landscape patterns and fire regimes. In this paper, we introduce REMAINS, a spatially explicit proce...
To implement the goals of the 2030 Global Biodiversity Framework, the European Biodiversity Strategy and the EU Green Deal, biodiversity monitoring is a pivotal instrument to achieve accountability and progress in conservation. Monitoring efforts in Europe, however, suffer from gaps and biases in taxonomy, spatial coverage, and temporal resolution,...
This report describes the database on biodiversity monitoring initiatives at the European level collected by EuropaBON (WP3 - task 3.1; EuropaBON biodiversity database from hereon) and the web-based platform (website) that contains it. The website serves the dual purpose of being the platform for data entry, as well as to allow the visualisation an...
Species' range shifts and local extinctions caused by climate change lead to community composition changes. At large spatial scales, ecological barriers, such as biome boundaries, coastlines, and elevation, can influence a community's ability to shift in response to climate change. Yet, ecological barriers are rarely considered in climate change st...
Declines in European bird populations are reported for decades but the direct effect of major anthropogenic pressures on such declines remains unquantified. Causal relationships between pressures and bird population responses are difficult to identify as pressures interact at different spatial scales and responses vary among species. Here, we uncov...
The goal of this task was to identify and characterise novel methods for biodiversity monitoring, and to assess their suitability for large scale deployment across Europe. To address this goal we combined extensive literature searches with expert consultation, namely using a survey and through an online workshop. The outcome of our searches is summ...
The FirESmart project – Nature-based solutions for preventive fire management and sustained supply of ecosystem services. Final Report – Project Deliverable R03
Increasing the policy impact and effectiveness of biodiversity monitoring in Europe: current state and gaps.
Research on island species–area relationships (ISAR) has expanded to incorporate
functional (IFDAR) and phylogenetic (IPDAR) diversity. However, relative to
the ISAR, we know little about IFDARs and IPDARs, and lack synthetic global
analyses of variation in form of these three categories of island diversity–area
relationship (IDAR). Here, we un...
The EuropaBON project seeks to design a European Biodiversity Observation Network to monitor the status and trends of European biodiversity and ecosystems in the coming years. To accomplish this, the project has brought together biodiversity monitoring experts and other relevant stakeholders from various sectors (policy, NGO, academia, business, ci...
The co-design of a European Observatory Observation Network requires information on the existing monitoring capacity in Europe, including the quantity and quality of the data available to generate the Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) identified in Task 4.1 at the spatial- and temporal resolutions desired by users and policy. In this document...
At large scales, the mechanisms underpinning stability in natural communities may vary in importance due to changes in species composition, mean abundance, and species richness. Here we link species characteristics (niche positions) and community characteristics (richness and abundance) to evaluate the importance of stability mechanisms in 156 butt...
Photovoltaic production is growing globally thanks to climate change mitigation efforts. However, this growth is seldom planned which can lead to conflicts with other land uses, mostly agriculture and biodiversity conservation. There is, therefore, urgent need for adequate planning to minimise potential conflicts. We demonstrate how to identify pri...
In southern Europe, land abandonment and an unbalanced investment toward fire suppression instead of prevention has gradually increased wildfire risk, which calls for a paradigm change in fire management policies. Here we combined scenario analysis, fire landscape modelling, and economic tools to identify which land-use policies would reduce the ex...
EuropaBON harnesses the power of modelling Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) to integrate different reporting streams, data sources, and monitoring schemes, and measure biodiversity change across multiple dimensions in space and time. Therefore, EBVs are at the core of the project and form the basis for several of the tasks feeding into the c...
Global climate warming is expected to increase wildfire hazard in many regions of the world. In southern Europe, land abandonment and an unbalanced investment toward fire suppression instead of prevention has gradually increased wildfire risk, which calls for a paradigm change in fire management policies. Here we combined scenario analysis, fire la...
Optimization methods are routinely used for landscape‐level conservation planning, but still underused in supporting species recovery programs. A possible barrier is the difficulty in representing and optimizing complex multidimensional problems: for example, many species recovery programs require management at the population level, but also alloca...
This project deliverable summaries the main findings and policy recommendations of the FirESmart project – Nature-based solutions for preventive fire management and sustained supply of ecosystem services. This research was funded by national funds through the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., under the FirESmart project (PCIF/MOG/0...
Increased large and high-intensity wildfires causes large socioeconomic and ecological impacts, which demands improved landscape management approaches where both ecological and societal dimensions are integrated. Engaging society in fire management requires a better understanding of stakeholders' perceptions of wildfires and landscape management. H...
Forests provide a wide variety of ecosystem services (ES) to society. The boreal biome is experiencing the highest rates of warming on the planet and increasing demand for forest products. To foresee how to maximize the adaptation of boreal forests to future warmer conditions and growing demands of forest products, we need a better understanding of...
Species response to land use can be examined under a functional perspective, where habitats are described according to species´ resource dependencies. Distribution or abundance models based on resource availability rather than land use types can be more informative about the ultimate processes behind observed population or distribution trends. Habi...
Discoglossus pictus is a North African amphibian that was introduced in southern France
early the 20th century and has spread south and north along the Mediterranean coastal plains up to 170 km. In order to disentangle the conservation implications of the spread of D. pictus for sensitive native species, we examined the impact of long‐term climate...
Comparing the impacts of future scenarios is essential for developing and guiding the political sustainability agenda. This review-based analysis compares six IPBES scenarios for their impacts on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 20 biodiversity targets (Aichi targets) for the Europe and Central Asia regions. The comparison is based on a...
Passive acoustic monitoring is a powerful tool for monitoring vocally active taxa. Automated signal recognition software reduces the expert time needed for recording analyses and allows researchers and managers to manage large acoustic datasets. The application of state-of-the-art techniques for automated identification, such as Convolutional Neura...
- Bayesian GLMs for non-wood ecosystem services (ES)
- Formulation and projection of scenarios of Climate Change Mitigation
Solutions (CCMS) and climate change at EU and national scales
- GLMs for evaluation of effects of climate and CCMS scenarios on ES
1. Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, natures contribution to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...
Future dynamics of biological invasions are highly uncertain because they depend on multiple environmental, societal and socio-economic drivers. We adopted a qualitative scenario approach to explore the future of invasive alien species (IAS) in Europe and created an overall strategy for their management that considers different plausible future dev...
The loss of open habitats in Europe has led to severe declines in birds associated with these habitats. However, certain ecological disturbances reverse the trend towards afforestation and create appropriate conditions for open-habitat species. Yet, open-habitat bird occupancy dynamics after disturbance depend on a complex combination of as-yet poo...
The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...
To reach the Paris Agreement, societies need to increase the global terrestrial carbon sink. There are many climate change mitigation solutions (CCMS) for forests, including increasing bioenergy, bioeconomy and protection. Bioenergy and bioeconomy solutions use climate-smart, intensive management to generate high quantities of bioenergy and bioprod...
En las últimas décadas, los bosques mediterráneos han presentado un nivel decreciente de presión humana directa, así como una mayor exposición a factores de estrés (p.ej. incendios forestales o sequías). Sin embargo, el efecto de estos fenómenos en los servicios que los ecosistemas (SE) proporcionan a la sociedad permanece sin explorar. Hemos emple...
Poster presentado en el CFE8 2022 (Lleida) sobre Cydalima perspectalis y su impacto en Catalunya.
Las especies invasoras pueden dar lugar a graves impactos en los ecosistemas invadidos tanto de manera directa como indirecta mediante la interacción con otras perturbaciones. En este trabajo estudiamos la distribución e impacto de la polilla del boj (Cydalima perspectalis) mediante la combinación de modelos de distribución de especies y sus proyec...
Aim
It is important to understand the factors affecting community stability because ecosystem function is increasingly at risk from biodiversity loss. Here, we evaluate how a key factor, the position of local environmental conditions within the thermal range of the species, influences the stability of butterfly communities at a continental scale....