Moreno Di Marco

Sapienza University of Rome | la sapienza · Department of Biology and Biotechnologies "Charles Darwin" BBCD

Effective ecosystem management requires a deep understanding of how human activities, such as livestock farming, impact ecological dynamics. Livestock farming influences vegetation structure, nutrient cycling, and wildlife behaviour, yet there are limited standardised methods for estimating livestock grazing pressure. Here we developed a standardis...

Studies aimed at estimating species response to climate change generally employ correlative species distribution models (SDMs) coupled with dispersal scenarios. However, dispersal distances are generally lacking or nonrepresentative, so researchers typically estimate dispersal distance from allometric relationships. Yet, these estimates ignore the...

Ecological corridors are essential for maintaining ecosystem functionality, allowing species movement between protected areas. In the Central Italian Apennines, five corridors have been identified to enhance habitat connectivity for the critically endangered Marsican brown bear (Ursus arctos marsicanus). This study focuses on two of these corridors...

The expansion of area-based conservation measures, such as protection and restoration efforts, as well as the design of multi-functional green and blue infrastructure, are widely seen as instrumental in halting or reversing further biodiversity decline. Europe has a long history of protection for biodiversity such as through the Natura 2000 program...

Biodiversity monitoring programs and citizen science data remain heavily biased towards the Global North. Incorporating social media data can complement existing gaps, especially in megadiverse countries with limited records, but whether such data can significantly improve our understanding of range-shifting species is unknown. Here, we collated lo...

Climate change has reached unprecedented levels, causing frequent extreme events like droughts and fires. Combined with land-use change, this crisis has impacted biodiversity, increasing species extinction rates, and Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP), degrading ecosystem functions. We developed a comparative extinction risk model for mammals s...

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species underpins much decision-making in conservation and plays a key role in monitoring the status and trends of biodiversity. However, the shortage of funds and assessor capacity slows the uptake of novel data and techniques, hampering its currency, applicability, consistency and long-term viability. To help addre...

Life-history traits have been identified as major indicators of mammals' susceptibility and exposure to viruses due to evolutionary constraints that link life-history speed with species’ ecology and immunity. Nonetheless, it is unclear where along the fast-slow continuum of mammalian life-history lies the greatest diversity of host species. Consequ...

Assessing the extinction risk of species based on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List (RL) is key to guiding conservation policies and reducing biodiversity loss. This process is resource demanding, however, and requires continuous updating, which becomes increasingly difficult as new species are added to the RL. Auto...

Coordinated policies and effective global environmental governance are needed to address the global biodiversity crisis. Human dimensions like geopolitics influence conservation decision‐making and outcomes. The importance of considering these complex social factors is heightened in an era of renewed great‐power politics, as the intensifying US–Chi...

Anthropogenic pressures have increasingly disrupted the integrity of ecosystems worldwide, jeopardizing their capacity to provide essential contributions to human well-being. Recently, the role of natural ecosystems in reducing disease emergence risk has gained prominence in decision-making processes, as scientific evidence indicates that human-dri...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that current global warming is unprecedented in the past 2000 years, and atmospheric CO2 levels are the highest in at least 2 million years. Such profound alteration of the global climate is exacerbating the effect of direct human pressure on biodiversity. Climate change affects human activities...

Variation in life histories influences demographic processes from adaptive changes to population declines leading to extinction. Among life history traits, generation length offers a critical feature to forecast species’ demographic trajectories such as population declines (widely used by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) and adaptability to...

Natural ecosystems store large amounts of carbon globally, as organisms absorb carbon from the atmosphere to build large, long-lasting, or slow-decaying structures such as tree bark or root systems. An ecosystem’s carbon sequestration potential is tightly linked to its biological diversity. Yet when considering future projections, many carbon seque...

1. Modelling approaches aimed at identifying currently unknown hosts of zoonotic diseases have the potential to make high-impact contributions to global strategies for zoonotic risk surveillance. However, geographical and taxonomic biases in host-pathogen associations might influence reliability of models and their predictions. 2. Here we propose a...

Based on an extensive model intercomparison, we assessed trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services from historical reconstructions and future scenarios of land-use and climate change. During the 20th century, biodiversity declined globally by 2 to 11%, as estimated by a range of indicators. Provisioning ecosystem services increased several fold...

Global change affects mountain areas at different levels, with some mountains being more exposed to change in climate or environmental conditions and others acting as local refugia. We quantified the exposure of the world’s mountains to three drivers of change, climate, land use, and human population density, using two spatial-temporal metrics (vel...

Infectious zoonotic disease emergence, through spillover events, is of global concern and has the potential to cause significant harm to society, as recently demonstrated by COVID-19. More than 70% of the 400 infectious diseases that emerged in the past five decades have a zoonotic origin, including all recent pandemics. There have been several app...

The expanding use of community science platforms has led to an exponential increase in biodiversity data in global repositories. Yet, understanding of species distributions remains patchy. Biodiversity data from social media can potentially reduce the global biodiversity knowledge gap. However, practical guidelines and standardized methods for harv...

Opportunity costs, the foregone economic benefits from alternative activities or uses of a resource on a particular site, represent one of multiple options to approximate costs of nature conservation and can be used alongside biodiversity and ecosystem services data in spatial conservation prioritisation analyses. However, such cost data are not ye...

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List is a central tool for extinction risk monitoring and influences global biodiversity policy and action. But, to be effective, it is crucial that it consistently accounts for each driver of extinction. Climate change is rapidly becoming a key extinction driver, but consideration of cl...

Comparative extinction risk analysis—which predicts species extinction risk from correlation with traits or geographical characteristics—has gained research attention as a promising tool to support extinction risk assessment in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. However, its uptake has been very limited so far, possibly because existing model...

Elevational gradients are characterized by strong environmental changes within small geographical distances, providing important insights on the response of biological communities to climate change. Mountain biodiversity is particularly sensitive to climate change, given the limited capacity to colonize new areas and the competition from upshifting...

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Focusing on Bangladesh, a tropical megadiverse and mega‐populated country, we examined the im...

Despite being central to the implementation of conservation policies, the usefulness of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species is hampered by the 14% of species classified as data‐deficient (DD) because information to evaluate these species’ extinction risk was lacking when they were last assessed o...

1. The expanding use of citizen science platforms has led to an exponential increase in biodiversity data in global repositories. Yet, our understanding of species distribution remains patchy for most of the world. Social media data has the potential to reduce the global biodiversity knowledge gap. However, practical guidelines and standardised pip...

Human pressure on the environment is increasing the frequency, diversity, and spatial extent of disease outbreaks. Despite international recognition, the interconnection between the health of the environment, animals, and humans has been historically overlooked. Past and current initiatives have often neglected prevention under the One Health prepa...

Increasing human pressures are driving a global loss of biodiversity and of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP)—the contributions of living nature to people’s quality of life. Understanding the spatial relationship between biodiversity and NCP is essential for securing Earth’s life support systems. Here we estimate the importance of high-biodive...

Comparative extinction risk analysis – which predicts species extinction risk from correlation with traits or geographical characteristics – has gained research attention as a promising tool to support extinction risk assessment in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. However, its uptake has been very limited so far, possibly because these mode...

Citizen science programs are becoming increasingly popular among naturalists but remain heavily biased taxonomically and geographically. However, with the explosive popularity of social media and the near-ubiquitous availability of smartphones, many post wildlife photographs on social media. Here, we illustrate the potential of harvesting these dat...

Mountain areas around the world are exposed to different drivers of global change, facing a dichotomy between being both climatic refugia and highly sensitive ecosystems. Through two different metrics, the velocity and the magnitude of change, we quantified the exposure of the world’s mountains to three drivers of change: climate, land-use, and hum...

Habitat fragmentation and overexploitation of natural resources are the most prevalent and severe threats to biodiversity in tropical forests. Several studies have estimated the effect of these threats on species extinction risk, however the effect resulting from their interaction remains poorly understood. Here, we assess whether and how habitat a...

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Here, focussing on Bangladesh - a tropical mega-diverse and mega-populated country, we examin...

Humans share an important fraction of their viral diseases with other mammals, but the patterns that govern host-virus associations remain largely unknown. Life-history traits have been identified as major indicators of mammals’ susceptibility and exposure to viruses, due to evolutionary constraints that link life-history speed with species’ ecolog...

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the European Union's main instrument for agricultural planning, with a new reform approved for 2023–2027. The CAP intends to align with the European Green Deal (EGD), a set of policy initiatives underpinning sustainable development and climate neutrality in the European Union (EU), but several flaws cast doub...

Working paper analysing the economic implications of the proposed 30% target for areal protection in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework

Assessing the extinction risk of species through the IUCN Red List is key to guiding conservation policies and reducing biodiversity loss. This process is resource-demanding, however, and requires a continuous update which becomes increasingly difficult as new species are added to the IUCN Red List. The use of automatic methods, such as comparative...

The Paris Agreement settled to limit global warming to 2°C and possibly 1.5°C from pre‐industrial times. However, little is known about the implications of such climatic goals for biodiversity once species' adaptability to new climatic conditions is accounted for. Here, we projected the bioclimatic space loss for mammalian communities across terres...

Mountains are among the natural systems most affected by climate change, and mountain mammals are considered particularly imperiled, given their high degree of specialization to narrow tolerance bands of environmental conditions. Climate change mitigation policies, such as the Paris Agreement, are essential to stem climate change impacts on natural...

Earth’s wilderness areas are reservoirs of genetic information and carbon storage systems, and are vital to reducing extinction risks. Retaining the conservation value of these areas is fundamental to achieving global biodiversity conservation goals; however, climate and land-use risk can undermine their ability to provide these functions. The exte...

Area of Habitat (AOH) is “the habitat available to a species, that is, habitat within its range”. It complements a geographic range map for a species by showing potential occupancy and reducing commission errors. AOH maps are produced by subtracting areas considered unsuitable for the species from their range map, using information on each species’...

Mining companies increasingly commit to a net positive impact on biodiversity. However, assessing the industry's progress toward achieving this goal is limited by knowledge of current mining threats to biodiversity and the relevant opportunities available for them to improve conservation outcomes. Here, we investigate the global exposure of terrest...

While systematic biodiversity surveys are common in the Global North, much of the tropics remains vastly under-surveyed. With the rise in popularity of social media and camera phones, millions of people are now sharing their photographs online, which can be an effective source of biodiversity occurrence data. Here, we report on just such an exercis...

Increasing human pressures are driving a global loss of biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP). Here, we estimated how preserving regions of high biodiversity value could reduce the risk of diminishing the provision of NCP. We analysed the impact of four different scenarios of climate change on the regulation of air quality (NCP3),...

Citizen science programmes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular among those with an interest in natural history, but remain the domain of a relatively small portion of the public and heavily biased toward certain areas. Although systematic recording of biodiversity data has been practiced for centuries in the Global North, many tropi...

Citizen science programmes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular among those with an interest in natural history, but remain the domain of a relatively small portion of the public and heavily biased toward certain areas. Although systematic recording of biodiversity data has been practiced for centuries in the Global North, many tropi...

In a new PLOS Biology paper, de Oliveira Caetano and colleagues presented an innovative method to estimate extinction risk in reptile species worldwide. The method shows a promising avenue to support Red List assessment, alongside some well-known challenges. This Primer explores the implications of a new PLOS Biology study that presents an innovati...

Ambitious conservation efforts are needed to stop the global biodiversity crisis. In this study, we estimate the minimum land area to secure important biodiversity areas, ecologically intact areas, and optimal locations for representation of species ranges and ecoregions. We discover that at least 64 million square kilometers (44% of terrestrial ar...

Area of Habitat (AOH) is ‘the habitat available to a species, that is, habitat within its range’. It complements a geographic range map for a species by showing potential occupancy and reducing commission errors. AOH maps are produced by subtracting areas considered unsuitable for the species from their range map, using information on each species’...

Habitat loss is the leading cause of the global decline in biodiversity, but the influence of human pressure within the matrix surrounding habitat fragments remains poorly understood. Here, we measure the relationship between fragmentation (the degree of fragmentation and the degree of patch isolation), matrix condition (measured as the extent of h...

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species is central in biodiversity conservation, but insufficient resources hamper its long-term growth, updating, and consistency. Models or automated calculations can alleviate those challenges by providing standardised estimates required for assessments, or prioriti...

Area of habitat (AOH) is defined as the “habitat available to a species, that is, habitat within its range” and is calculated by subtracting areas of unsuitable land cover and elevation from the range. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Habitats Classification Scheme provides information on species habitat associations, a...

To meet the ambitious objectives of biodiversity and climate conventions, the international community requires clarity on how these objectives can be operationalized spatially and how multiple targets can be pursued concurrently. To support goal setting and the implementation of international strategies and action plans, spatial guidance is needed...

Under unsustainable rates of global biodiversity loss, there is urgent need to improve area-based conservation interventions and focus on regions with the highest conservation value. Efficient conservation plans require knowledge of the most important biodiversity areas, but several global prioritization maps show incongruent definition of these ar...

Human activities are drastically reshaping Earths ecosystems. Across the tree of life, species become threatened and ultimately go extinct when they are unable to cope with these changes. Hence, understanding the resilience of natural populations is necessary to understand and predict species capacity to cope with increasing human pressures. Here,...

The idea that several small, rather than a single large, habitat areas should hold the highest total species richness (the so‐called SLOSS debate) brings into question the importance of habitat fragmentation to extinction risk. SLOSS studies are generally addressed over a short time scale, potentially ignoring the long‐term dimension of extinction...

Human activities are altering the structure of ecosystems, compromising the benefits they provide to nature and people. Effective conservation actions and management under ongoing global change rely on a better understanding of socio-ecological patterns and processes across broad spatiotemporal scales. Both macroecology and conservation science con...

Accelerated loss of Earth’s wilderness over the last five decades underscores the urgency for efforts to retain the conservation value of these areas. Assessing how wilderness areas are likely to be impacted by the future environmental change is fundamental to achieving global biodiversity conservation goals. Using scenarios of climate and land-use...

Area of Habitat (AOH) is defined as the habitat available to a species, that is, habitat within its range and is produced by subtracting areas of unsuitable land cover and elevation from the range. Habitat associations are documented using the IUCN Habitats Classification Scheme, and unvalidated expert opinion has been used so far to match habitat...

The breadth of a species' climatic niche is an important ecological trait that allows adaptation to climate change, but human activities often reduce realised niche breadth by impacting species distributions. Some life‐history traits, such as dispersal ability and reproductive speed, allow species to cope with both human impact and climate change....

The use of species’ traits in macroecological analyses has gained popularity in the last decade, becoming an important tool to understand global biodiversity patterns. Currently, trait data can be found across a wide variety of data sets included in websites, articles, and books, each one with its own taxonomic classification, set of traits, and da...

Habitat loss is the leading cause of global biodiversity decline, but the influence of human pressure within the matrix surrounding habitat fragments remains poorly understood. Here we measure the relationship between fragmentation, matrix condition (measured as the extent of high human footprint levels), and the change in extinction risk of 4,327...