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Publications (144)
Rewilding has emerged as an audacious conservation approach aiming atrestoring wild species interactions and their regulation of ecosystem processesby focusing on the key role of species that have been extensively extirpated byhumans. Rewilding has gained increasing attention from scientists, conserva-tionists and the mass-media. Yet, it has raised...
The ability to monitor changes in biodiversity, and their societal impact, is critical to conserving species and managing ecosystems. While emerging technologies increase the breadth and reach of data acquisition, monitoring efforts are still spatially and temporally fragmented, and taxonomically biased. Appropriate long-term information remains th...
Large‐scale ecological restoration is crucial for effective biodiversity conservation and combating climate change. However, perspectives on the goals and values of restoration are highly diverse, as are the different approaches to restoration e.g. ranging from the restoration of cultural ecosystems to rewilding. We assess how the future of nature...
In this report, we present the analysis of the different available biodiversity data streams at the EU and national level, both baseline biodiversity data and monitoring data. We assess how these biodiversity data inform and trigger policy action and identify the related challenges the different European countries and relevant EU agencies face and...
Facilitating “wildness”
Humans have encroached upon a majority of Earth's lands. The current extinction crisis is a testament to human impacts on wilderness. If there is any hope of retaining a biodiverse planetary system, we must begin to learn how to coexist with, and leave space for, other species. The practice of “rewilding” has emerged as a me...
Fiber is essential for rumen health, microbial fermentation, and the energy supply of herbivores. Even though the study of fecal fiber contents (neutral detergent fiber NDF, acid detergent fiber ADF, and acid detergent lignin ADL) using near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) has allowed investigating nutritional ecology of different herbivor...
To address the biodiversity crisis, global and regional policy frameworks like the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the European Green Deal demand to monitor biodiversity. Despite these efforts, existing approaches for monitoring biodiversity remain fragmented and lack data integration. Here, we review and synthesize crucial infor...
Due to the central role of landscape connectivity in many ecological processes, evaluating and accounting for it has gained attention in both theoretical and applied ecological sciences. To address this challenge, researchers often use generic species to simplify multi‐species connectivity assessments. Yet, this approach tends to oversimplify movem...
The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a novel tool for the development of positive scenarios centred on the relationship of nature and people, emphasising biodiversity as part of the solution to environmental challenges across various spatial and temporal scales, explicitly addressing a plurality of values for nature.
In this work, we describe the...
1. Due to the central role of landscape connectivity in many ecological processes, evaluating and accounting for it has gained attention in both theoretical and applied ecological sciences. To address this challenge, researchers often used generic species to simplify multi-species connectivity assessments. Yet, this approach tends to oversimplify m...
Forests are vital for outdoor recreation, benefiting mental, physical, and social well-being. While the importance of forest structure in supporting biodiversity and material ecosystem functions is well-documented, research on its relationship with non-material contributions to people remains limited, and there is a lack of robust indicators for th...
A key goal of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 is the design of a connected Trans European Nature Network (TEN-N), that helps to build a coherent and resilient network of protected areas across Europe. The TEN-N will need to consider and integrate societal perspectives on future biodiversity protection in Europe, accounting for multiple values...
The scarcity of long-term observational data has limited the use of statistical or machine-learning techniques for predicting intraannual ecological variation. However, time-stamped citizen-science observation records, supported by media data such as photographs, are increasingly available. In the present article, we present a novel framework based...
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...
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.
Ecological connectivity is key to maintaining a coherent and resilient network of protected areas in the EU. The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 has identified the unhindered movement of species, nutrients and ecological processes across connected landscapes as a key feature of a coherent Trans-European Nature Network (TEN-N) of protected and con...
The Deliverable discusses the critical role of soil in supporting terrestrial ecosystems, agriculture, and global climate regulation. It highlights that a significant portion of European soils are currently unhealthy, which has far-reaching consequences, including risks to human health, the environment, and the economy. Soil degradation affects foo...
The report demonstrates the potential workflows to leverage monitoring data on biodiversity to assess the status of two selected habitats of the Habitats Directive, Nardus grasslands (EU habitats directive Annex I 6230*) and forest dominated by Fagus sylvatica on acidic soils (habitat 9110).
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...
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...
Rewilding is an emerging paradigm in restoration science and is increasingly gaining popularity as a cost‐effective ecosystem restoration option. A rewilding framework was recently proposed that contains three integral components: restoring trophic complexity, allowing for stochastic disturbances and enhancing species' potential to disperse. Howeve...
A relevant number of ecological questions raised by policymakers, managers, and citizens often pertain to the short-term future (e.g., the coming days or weeks). In this sense, short-term ecological and biological forecasts can make substantial and practical contributions to achieving policy objectives and benefit society broadly. Specifically, sho...
The rate and extent of global biodiversity change is surpassing our ability to measure, monitor and forecast trends. We propose an interconnected worldwide system of observation networks — a global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS) — to coordinate monitoring worldwide and inform action to reach international biodiversity targets.
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...
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,...
The EBV Data Portal API is specifically designed for the machine-readable integration, sharing, and utilization of EBV datasets and currently supports only GET requests in its initial version. The ebv_download function of the R package utilizes this REST API to download the EBV datasets. The API is accessible via the URL https://portal.geobon.org/a...
Spatial predictions of intra-annual ecological variation enhance ecological understanding and inform decision-making. Unfortunately, it is often challenging to use statistical or machine learning techniques to make such predictions, due to the scarcity of systematic, long-term observational data. Conversely, opportunistic time-stamped observation r...
Increasing the policy impact and effectiveness of biodiversity monitoring in Europe: current state and gaps.
Effective, evidence‐based management is required to ensure long‐term coexistence between people and wildlife in an increasingly humanized world. Although behavioural individuality is recognized as a key factor affecting evolutionary and ecological processes, it has rarely been explicitly assessed in relation to human–wildlife conflicts. The ‘proble...
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...
Ungulate populations are increasing across Europe with important implications for forest plant communities. Concurrently, atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition continues to eutrophicate forests, threatening many rare, often more nutrient-efficient, plant species. These pressures may critically interact to shape biodiversity as in grassland and tundra...
Long-term information on species trends is needed to accurately assess the magnitude of biodiversity change. Mining wildlife records from historical documents is a promising option to describe past species distributions and estimate conservation baselines. However, historical species records have multiple biases, and ignoring them can produce disto...
Long-term approaches are needed to accurately assess the magnitude of biodiversity change. Mining historical documents that include wildlife citations is a promising approach to describe past species distributions and derive conservation baselines. However, historical species records have multiple biases (just as contemporary ones) and ignoring the...
Reference conditions are necessary to assess the conservation status of species, understand their declines, and manage their recovery. Historical documents offer large amounts of records of a wide variety of species, which may be used to generate reference baselines on the historical distribution range of species. We collected information on the Ib...
Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) are used to monitor the status and trends in biodiversity at multiple spatiotemporal scales. These provide an abstraction level between raw biodiversity observations and indicators, enabling better access to policy-relevant biodiversity information. Furthermore, the EBV vision aims to support detection of cri...
The concept of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) was conceived to study, report, and manage biodiversity change. The EBV netCDF structure was developed in order to support publication and interoperability of biodiversity data. This standard is based on the Network Common Data Format (netCDF). Additionally, it follows the Climate and Forecast...
The biodiversity crisis we are experiencing requires more than ever the establishment of an observation and monitoring system to help us understand where we have the greatest problems, to inform actions to help halt and reverse biodiversity loss in those places, and to anticipate the impact of our future actions. The Essential Biodiversity Variable...
Ungulate herbivore populations are increasing across Europe with important implications for forest plant communities. Concurrently, atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition continues to eutrophy forests, threatening many rare plant species. These pressures may critically interact to shape biodiversity as in grassland and tundra systems, yet any potentia...
Populations inhabiting the periphery of species distribution ranges may experience suboptimal environmental conditions and higher vulnerability to anthropogenic pressures. Disentangling the role of natural and human-related factors and the relationships among them in these marginal areas is thus key to understand and prevent species declines and ra...
Assemblages of large mammal species play a disproportionate role in the structure and composition of natural habitats. Loss of these assemblages destabilizes natural systems, while their recovery can restore ecological integrity. Here we take an ecoregion‐based approach to identify landscapes that retain their historically present large mammal asse...
Observations are key to understand the drivers of biodiversity loss, and the impacts on ecosystem services and ultimately on people. Many EU policies and initiatives demand unbiased, integrated and regularly updated biodiversity and ecosystem service data. However, efforts to monitor biodiversity are spatially and temporally fragmented, taxonomical...
Human encroachment into natural habitats is typically followed by conflicts derived from wildlife damage to agriculture and livestock. Spatial risk modelling is a useful tool to gain the understanding of wildlife damage and mitigate conflicts. Although resource selection is a hierarchical process operating at multiple scales, risk models usually fa...
Rewilding is gaining importance across Europe, as agricultural abandonment trajectories provide opportunities for large‐scale ecosystem restoration. However, its effective implementation is hitherto limited, in part due to a lack of monitoring of rewilding interventions and their interactions. Here, we provide a first assessment of rewilding progre...
Monitoring global biodiversity from space through remotely sensing geospatial patterns has high potential to add to our knowledge acquired by field observation. Although a framework of essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) is emerging for monitoring biodiversity, its poor alignment with remote sensing products hinders interpolation between field...
Brown bears Ursus arctos were historically persecuted and almost eradicated from southern Europe in the twentieth century as a result of hunting and direct persecution. The effects of human-induced mortality were exacerbated by other threats, such as habitat loss and fragmentation, due to the expansion of human populations. As a result, nowadays th...
Despite conservation commitments, most countries still lack large-scale biodiversity monitoring programs to track progress toward agreed targets. Monitoring program design is frequently approached from a top-down, data-centric perspective that ignores the socio-cultural context of data collection. A rich landscape of people and organizations, with...
Essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) are designed to support the detection and quantification of biodiversity change and to define priorities in biodiversity monitoring. Unlike most primary observations of biodiversity phenomena, EBV products should provide information readily available to produce policy-relevant biodiversity indicators, ideally...
Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) are integrated information products typically derived from disparate sources of primary observations combined by the use of biodiversity models and data integration algorithms. Furthermore, developing policy-relevant indicators from EBVs requires an additional level of integration between datasets that inform...
The Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) are important information sources for scientists and decision makers. They are developed and promoted by the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) together with the community. EBVs provide an abstraction level between measurements and indicators. This enables access to bio...
Rewilding is emerging as a promising restoration strategy to enhance the conservation status of biodiversity and promote self-regulating ecosystems while re-engaging people with nature. Overcoming the challenges in monitoring and reporting rewilding projects would improve its practical implementation and maximize its conservation and restoration ou...
Satellite remote sensing presents an amazing opportunity to inform biodiversity conservation by inexpensively gathering repeated information for vast areas of the Earth. However, these observations first need processing and interpretation in they are to inform conservation action.
Through a series of case studies, this book presents detailed exampl...
Terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) is a central process in the climate system, is a major component in the terrestrial water budget, and is responsible for the distribution of water and energy on land surfaces especially in arid and semiarid areas. In order to inform water management decisions especially in scarce water environments, it is importa...
Aim
Large carnivore populations in Europe are expanding into new areas. This generates opportunities to improve their conservation status, but also creates a need to address new conflicts with humans. Species management units are constrained by administrative boundaries, but effective conservation and conflict management require a continental‐scale...
The mitigation of the conflicts associated to livestock predation and agriculture damage is pivotal for the conservation of large carnivores in Europe. Aiming to identify the management strategies that more efficiently mitigate these conflicts, we made a critical review of the current policies to manage damage made by brown bears, lynx, wolves and...
Aim
(1) To evaluate whether geographic variation in population abundance of a widespread mammal ( Pecari tajacu ) is related to its location with respect to the centroid of its ecological niche or to the centroid of its geographic range. (2) To assess whether the abundance–niche centrality relationship defines the maximum expected abundance at any...
