Mario Díaz

The National Museum of Natural Sciences · Biogeography and Global Change

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...

Conversion of semi-natural habitats, such as field margins, fallows, hedgerows, grassland, woodlots and forests, to agricultural land could increase agricultural production and help meet rising global food demand. Yet, the extent to which such habitat loss would impact biodiversity and wild species is unknown. Here we survey species richness for fo...

Feral cat colonies in cities improve the wellbeing of people who feed and care for them, but they can have negative effects on biodiversity due to the predatory behaviour of cats. We analyse the effect of the presence of the 1171 colonies of feral cats reported for the city of Madrid (Spain) on the flight escape distances (FIDs) of birds to approac...

The Covid-19 lockdown reduced drastically human presence outdoors, providing an uncontrolled experiment for disentangling direct and indirect effects of human presence on animal fearfulness. We measured 18,494 flight initiation distances (FIDs, the distance at which individual animals fly away when approached by a human) from 1333 populations of 20...

Conservation of Europe's biodiversity increasingly depends on funds invested within Natura 2000 farmland. Performance of these investments is estimated by the official Farmland Bird Index indicator, that merges species-specific trends for farmland species estimated with the standard TRIM method. We here reanalyze the long-term datasets used to calc...

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...

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,...

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...

Understanding habitat and spatial overlap in sympatric species of urban areas would aid in predicting species and community modifications in response to global change. Habitat overlap has been widely investigated for specialist species but neglected for generalists living in urban settings. Many corvid species are generalists and are adapted to urb...

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...

Generalist mice are key species for the long-term dynamics of fragmented forests due to their dual role as seed dispersers or predators of the dominant trees. Wood mice, Apodemus sylvaticus, usually act as a net predator in woodlots due to higher winter densities and earlier winter reproduction than in forests. Here we analyze the recruitment expec...

Risk of predation is one of the main constraints of small mammal distribution and foraging activity. Aside from numerical effects on population size due to the presence and abundance of predators, indirect cues, such as vegetation structure and moonlight, determine patterns of activity and microhabitat use by small mammals. Indirect cues are expect...

Climate and land use change are key global change drivers shaping future species' distributions and abundances. Negative interactions among effects of drivers can reduce the accuracy of models aimed at predicting such distributions. Here we analyse how climate and land use affected population dynamics and demography of the Algerian mouse (Mus spret...

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'...

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...

European green agricultural policies have been relaxed to allow cultivation of fallow land to produce animal feed and meet shortfalls in exports from Ukraine and Russia. However, conversion of semi-natural habitats will disproportionately impact long term biodiversity and food security. In their Comment in @CommsEarth, Manuel Morales and colleagues...

Foraging decisions by rodents are key for the long-term maintenance of oak populations in which avian seed dispersers are absent or inefficient. Decisions are determined by the environmental setting in which acorn-rodent encounters occur. In particular, seed value, competition and predation risks have been found to modify rodent foraging decisions...

Land-use change is the main driver of biodiversity loss in the Mediterranean basin. New socioeconomic conditions produced a rewilding process so that cultural landscapes are being invaded by more natural habitats. We analyze the effects of landscape change on the demography and the spatial distribution of Crocidura russula in six protected areas of...

The Covid-19 lockdown reduced drastically human presence outdoors, providing an uncontrolled experiment for disentangling direct and indirect effects of human presence on animal fearfulness. We measured 18,494 flight initiation distances (FIDs, the distance at which individual animals fly away when approached by a human) from 1,333 populations of 2...

The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has not halted farmland biodiversity loss. The CAP post‐2023 has a new ‘‘Green Architecture,’’ including the new ‘‘Eco‐scheme’’ instrument. How can this new Green Architecture help tackle the biodiversity crisis? Through 13 workshops and an online survey, over 300 experts from 23 European Member...

We human beings are becoming urban citizens. More and more people spend their lives in urban environments, so that the conservation and improvement of urban biodiversity is an increasingly hot topic. On the one hand, as cities grow bigger and more populated they can become more hostile for some birds, but cities can also be safer than the surroundi...

Urbanization constitutes one of the most aggressive drivers of habitat and biodiversity loss worldwide. However, studies focused on determining the response of local biodiversity to urbanization are still scarce, especially in tropical ecosystems. Urban ecosystems are characterized by low biological productivity which in turn leads to a reduction i...

Wildfires are important sources of landscape change in Mediterranean environments, creating large patches of low-growth natural habitats (i.e., scrublands) inside protected areas, whereas woodland patches remain mostly near well protected human settlements. Landscape patterns resulting from these gradients influence habitat suitability for mesocarn...

Wildfires are important sources of landscape change in Mediterranean environments, creating large patches of natural habitats (i.e., scrublands) inside protected areas, whereas woodland patches remained at the border in the vicinity of human settlements. Landscape patterns resulting from these gradients influence habitat suitability for mesocarnivo...

Fires are usually seen as a threat for biodiversity conservation in the Mediterranean, but natural afforestation after abandonment of traditional land uses is leading to the disappearance of open spaces that benefit many species of conservation interest. Fires create open habitats in which small mammals can live under more favourable conditions, su...

Use of bird behaviour to estimate impacts of feral cat colonies in cities

Refuge–mediated apparent competition is the mechanism by which invasive plants increase pressure on native plants by providing refuge for generalist consumers. In the UK, the invasive Rhododendron ponticum does not provide food for generalist seed consumers like rodents, but evergreen canopy provides refuge from rodent predators, and predation and...

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...

Scatter-hoarding decisions by rodents are key for the long-term maintenance of scattered tree populations. Decisions are determined by seed value, competition and predation risk, so that they can be influenced by the integrity of the biological system composed by trees, rodents, ungulate competitors, and rodent predators. We manipulate and model th...

Only a handful of bird species can be considered specialists of Mediterranean pine forests; however, many forest birds occupy pine and mixed forest, due to the biogeographic history of Mediterranean forest birds. Nevertheless, pine forest bird communities show clear-cut responses to changes in forest distribution, structure and composition at both...

Review on the environmental and social aspect needed to achieve a real clean, safe and efficiente energy transition, both in Spain and elsewhere.

Agri-environment schemes (AES) are a major conservation tool for protecting declining farmland birds in Europe. Most studies evaluate AES effectiveness on taxonomic diversity but there is a knowledge gap about how AES affect functional responses. We evaluate the effects of different AES on taxonomic and functional responses of open-land and overall...

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...

The next reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the period 2021- 2027 (currently extended to 2023-2030) requires the approval by the European Commission of a Strategic Plan with environmental objectives for each Member State. Here we use the best available scientific evidence on the relationships between agricultural practices and bi...

Review on the scientific basis for the management of bird diversity in cities

Agri-environmental schemes (AES) of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) aims at reversing the negative effects of agricultural intensification on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Landscape context may modulate, and even constraint, AES effectiveness. We evaluate AES effectiveness on ant abundance, diversity and community composition. Ants are...

Iberian dehesas and montados are agroforestry systems protected by the European Habitats Directive due to high levels of biological diversity associated to their savannah-like structure. Tree scattering in dehesas, montados and other agroforestry systems is, however, known to compromise tree regeneration, although recent work suggests that it may p...

Las personas vivimos cada vez más en ambientes urbanos. Por ello, la importancia de la conservación y mejora de la biodiversidad urbana aumenta a medida que las ciudades son mayores y puede que más hostiles. Los factores que afectan a la salud de las personas, como es el caso de la contaminación del aire, puede que también disminuyan la biodiversid...

Bird communities inhabiting tropical rainforests are sensitive to changes in vegetation structure, either natural (e.g. treefalls or landslides) or man-made. Natural changes tend to increase diversity and abundance, whereas anthropic changes often have the opposite effect. We analyse how landscaping for the creation of research facilities influence...

The European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) still fails to address the environmental and socioeconomic challenges of EU’s agriculture. Agricultural ecosystems are further degrading, biodiversity is declining and agricultural Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions remain high. At the same time, farms are facing unresolved socio-economic chall...

Agricultural intensification continues to threaten habitat and biological diversity in farmland. In Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has established several measures to support biodiversity-fostering elements such as landscape features, semi-natural habitats and extensive land uses, together referred to as Green and Blue Infrastructure...

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...

Enhancing “Greening” of the Common Agricultural Policy for biodiversity conservation in a collaborative way: The case of Spanish dry-cereal croplands. Elena D. Concepción, Yanka Kazakova, Vyara Stefanova, Katrina Marsden and Mario Díaz In agricultural landscapes, Green and Blue Infrastructure (GBI) comprises landscape elements that are essential...

Agricultural intensification continues being a major threat for biodiversity worldwide. Despite the incorporation of diverse conservation tools in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since the 1990s, European agriculture continues intensifying. The last CAP reform introduced compulsory greening, including measures to support semi-natural habitats...

Highlights: Shrews' populations were mainly affected by habitat and season in the Med-iterranean. • Abundance, occupancy and colonization were always higher in shrublands than in woodlands. • Population growth rates were intrinsi-cally regulated by density-dependence. • Humidity and rainfall variance negatively affected populations. Small endothe...

Small endotherms would be especially exposed to main global change drivers (habitat and climate changes) but would also be able to withstand them by adjusting population dynamics locally to changing climate- and habitat- driven food and predation conditions. We analyse the relative importance of changes in climate (mean and variability, including r...

Urbanization, one of the most extreme human-induced environmental changes, is negatively affecting biodiversity worldwide, strongly suggesting that we should reconcile urban development with conservation. Urbanization can follow two extreme types of development within a continuum: land sharing (buildings mixed with dispersed green space) or land sp...

Urban areas are expanding globally as a consequence of human population increases, with overall negative effects on biodiversity. To prevent the further loss of biodiversity, it is urgent to understand the mechanisms behind this loss to develop evidence‐based sustainable solutions to preserve biodiversity in urban landscapes. The two extreme urban...

Jokimäki et al. 2019 Land-sharing vs. land-sparing urban development modulate predator-prey interactions in Europe. Data 01112019

We present a new comprehensive index for mapping the relative conservation value of threatened biodiversity. The index is based on explicit criteria to (1) select threatened species according to regional government responsibility for species' conservation; (2) combine species' presence by means of weighting factors based on differences in threat st...

Agri-environment schemes (AES) and greening of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are crucial tools for biodiversity conservation in Europe. However, they have not been associated formally to any performance monitoring program that supports their actual benefits for biodiversity, and their effectiveness is recurrently questioned. We present an ex...

Flight initiation distance (FID), the distance at which individuals take flight when approached by a potential (human) predator, is a tool for understanding predator-prey interactions. Among the factors affecting FID, tests of effects of group size (i.e. number of potential prey) on FID have yielded contrasting results. Group size or flock size cou...

Managing agricultural landscapes to support biodiversity and ecosystem services is a key aim of a sustainable agriculture. However, how the spatial arrangement of crop fields and other habitats in landscapes impacts arthropods and their functions is poorly known. Synthesising data from 49 studies (1515 landscapes) across Europe, we examined effects...

Abstract: Agricultural intensification has driven the elimination of seminatural habitats and landscape elements, such as stream and field margins, hedgerows, grasslands or woodlands, which are now called green and blue infrastructure (GBI). GBI is crucial for ensuring ecological connectivity and biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes...

Managing agricultural landscapes to support biodiversity and ecosystem services is a key aim of a sustainable agriculture. However, how the spatial arrangement of crop fields and other habitats in landscapes impacts arthropods and their functions is poorly known. Synthesising data from 49 studies (1515 landscapes) across Europe, we examined effects...

Citizen science projects have proliferated in the last decades, becoming a critical form of public engagement in science. However, monitoring based on citizen science must take special care on the analyses and/or standardization of volunteer’s variation in sampling and identification skills. Key aspects such as detectability of species and ability...

Abstract National accounting either ignores or fails to give due values to the ecosystem services, products, incomes and environmental assets of a country. To overcome these shortcomings, we apply spatially-explicit extended accounts that incorporate a novel environmental income indicator, which we test in the forests of Andalusia (Spain). Extende...

Improving species community diversity studies needs population abundances to be calculated. Micromammal population densities are highly variable at small spatial scales. Mark-recapture methods based on grid trapping is the most reliable technique to study density in small rodents, albeit it is time-consuming because it necessitates increasing the n...

Human proximity often have negative consequences for wildlife. However, animals may also benefit from human proximity in terms of availability of resources and protection against predators and parasites. We recorded the distance between all birds detected during the breeding season along 18 5-km transects and the nearest inhabited house in three ar...

Life-history theory predicts that current behaviour affects future reproduction, implying that animals should optimise their escape strategies to reflect fitness costs and benefits of premature escape. Both costs and benefits of escape may change temporally with important consequences for the evolution of escape strategies. Moreover, escape strateg...