The Natura 2000 site „Oranovski Prolom - Leshko” (BG0001022) was studied in Jul 2013-Dec 2017 in order to supplement and summarize the information about the diversity and distribution of the ...herpetofauna. Two new species of amphibians (Caudata) and 8 new species of reptiles (4 Sauria and 4 Serpentes) have been registered. Thus the total number of the representatives of herpetofauna is 29 (10 amphibians and 19 reptiles).
Protected areas are essential for conserving biodiversity, and these lands have traditionally been set aside for this purpose alone. However, the increasing global demand for agricultural and ...forestry commodities creates conflict and tradeoffs between dedicating land for conservation versus food production. Efforts to set aside new lands for biodiversity conservation are compromised by the globally rising demand, creating trade-offs between lands dedicated to conservation versus food production. Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems. Recent studies suggest that protected areas provide social and economic benefits that can be used to build political support and raise funds for conservation. We analyzed the capability of current protected area networks in the semi-arid region of Spain to provide intermediate regulating services (habitat preservation for threatened species, climate regulation, erosion control and water flow maintenance) to support the final provisioning service of cultivated crops to support local communities. We found that existing networks of protected lands supply considerable quantities of ecosystem services, in particular carbon stocks and groundwater recharge. Our results demonstrate that the integration of systematic analyses of ecosystem services gaps in protected area planning could contribute substantially to safeguarding ecosystem services and biodiversity jointly. However, our study also reveals substantial differences in intermediate ecosystem services supplied by different of protected areas networks, with category VI areas (Natura-2000 sites) generally showing the highest potential for ecosystem services supply. This demonstrates the important role of Natura-2000 sites for preserving regulating services in the European semi-arid region.
•Ecosystem service supply is analyzed across Natura-2000 and RENPA networks.•Spatial delivery of four intermediate services and a final service is analyzed.•Protected areas supply slightly higher levels of services than non-protected areas.•Spatial trade-offs occur between the final and intermediate ecosystem services.•Non-protected areas represent gaps in the preservation of ecosystem services.
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•Cap de Creus shelf and submarine canyon host a diverse benthic ecosystem.•Over 165 (morpho)species identified in the images, organized in nine megabenthic communities.•These include ...CWCs, octocoral gardens, sponge grounds and echinoderm aggregations.•Spatial distribution is mainly determined by depth, substrate type & bottom currents.
The continental shelf and submarine canyon off Cap de Creus (NW Mediterranean) were declared a Site of Community Importance (SCI) within the Natura 2000 Network in 2014. Implementing an effective management plan to preserve its biological diversity and monitor its evolution through time requires a detailed characterization of its benthic ecosystem. Based on 60 underwater video transects performed between 2007 and 2013 (before the declaration of the SCI), we thoroughly describe the composition and structure of the main megabenthic communities dwelling from the shelf down to 400 m depth inside the submarine canyon. We then mapped the spatial distribution of the benthic communities using the Random Forest algorithm, which incorporated geomorphological and oceanographic layers as predictors, as well as the intensity of the bottom-trawling fishing fleet. Although the study area has historically been exposed to commercial fishing practices, it still holds a rich benthic ecosystem with over 165 different invertebrate (morpho)species of the megafauna identified in the video footage, which form up to 9 distinct megabenthic communities. The continental shelf is home to coral gardens of the sea fan Eunicella cavolini, sea pen and soft coral assemblages, dense beds of the crinoid Leptometra phalangium, diverse sponge grounds and massive aggregations of the brittle star Ophiothrix fragilis. The submarine canyon off Cap de Creus is characterized by a cold-water coral community dominated by the scleractinian coral Madrepora oculata, found in association with several invertebrate species including oysters, brachiopods and a variety of sponge species, as well as by a community dominated by cerianthids and sea urchins, mostly in sedimentary areas. The benthic communities identified in the area were then compared with habitats/biocenoses described in reference habitat classification systems that consider circalittoral and bathyal environments of the Mediterranean. The complex environmental setting characteristic of the marine area off Cap de Creus likely produces the optimal conditions for communities dominated by suspension- and filter-feeding species to develop. The uniqueness of this ecosystem and the anthropogenic pressures that it faces should prompt the development of effective management actions to ensure the long-term conservation of the benthic fauna representative of this marine area.
The sustainable management of natural heritage is presently considered a global strategic issue. Owing to the ever-growing availability of free data and software, remote sensing (RS) techniques have ...been primarily used to map, analyse, and monitor natural resources for conservation purposes. The need to adopt multi-scale and multi-temporal approaches to detect different phenological aspects of different vegetation types and species has also emerged. The time-series composite image approach allows for capturing much of the spectral variability, but presents some criticalities (e.g., time-consuming research, downloading data, and the required storage space). To overcome these issues, the Google Earth engine (GEE) has been proposed, a free cloud-based computational platform that allows users to access and process remotely sensed data at petabyte scales. The application was tested in a natural protected area in Calabria (South Italy), which is particularly representative of the Mediterranean mountain forest environment. In the research, random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and classification and regression tree (CART) algorithms were used to perform supervised pixel-based classification based on the use of Sentinel-2 images. A process to select the best input image (seasonal composition strategies, statistical operators, band composition, and derived vegetation indices (VIs) information) for classification was implemented. A set of accuracy indicators, including overall accuracy (OA) and multi-class F-score (Fm), were computed to assess the results of the different classifications. GEE proved to be a reliable and powerful tool for the classification process. The best results (OA = 0.88 and Fm = 0.88) were achieved using RF with the summer image composite, adding three VIs (NDVI, EVI, and NBR) to the Sentinel-2 bands. SVM and RF produced OAs of 0.83 and 0.80, respectively.
The Capbreton Canyon System is an area currently under study for its proposal as a Site of Community Importance under the EU Habitats Directive in the context of the LIFE IP INTEMARES project. ...Identifying and mapping benthic Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs) plays a key role in this process. Although obtaining information on species distribution in deep sea rocky habitats has traditionally been a complicated task, the development of underwater remote sensing techniques resulted in a massive increase in the collection of digital imagery; however, processing all this information has led to another bottleneck due to the time-consuming nature of biota manual annotation. At this point, the use of computer vision and deep learning to automate image processing has substantial benefits but has rarely been adopted within the field of marine ecology. This study presents the integration of deep learning techniques for benthic fauna identification, high resolution multibeam echosounder (MBES) data and Species Distribution Models (SDMs), to map the potential habitat of the yellow coral Dendrophyllia cornigera, a representative species of the VME 1170 Reef habitat, on the circalitoral area of the Capbreton Canyon System. The localization and identification of the coral colonies was based on more than 7500 photographs taken during the INTEMARES-CapBreton 0619 and 0620 surveys using the photogrammetric ROTV Politolana. For the automatic annotation of the image set a deep learning based framework was developed by testing two different deep neural networks architectures; a FasterRCNN+Resnet101 model, accomplishing a precision of 100% over human expert annotation for presence/absence discrimination, was selected. Environmental data included different quantitative terrain attributes derived from high resolution MBES bathymetry data. A presence-only species distribution model, Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt), was used to infer the spatial distribution of D. cornigera over the study area. Predicted occurrences corresponded mainly to relevant topographic structures with significant slope, mainly associated to the edge of the continental shelf. These results are consistent with the ecological knowledge on the species and validate the use of deep learning tools to assist in the identification and mapping of VME for management and conservation purposes. This study provides a baseline for the protection of vulnerable habitats of the Capbreton Canyon System in the context of the Natura 2000 Network.
•Manual annotation of underwater imagery is a major drawback in benthic habitats mapping.•Deep Learning model accomplished a precision of 100% over human expert annotation for discrimination of D. cornigera.•Yellow coral distribution corresponded to relevant topographic structures associated to the edge of the continental shelf.•This study provides a baseline for the protection of vulnerable benthic habitats of the Capbreton Canyon System.
Nitrogen deposition from aviation emissions Quadros, Flávio D.A.; van Loo, Marijn; Snellen, Mirjam ...
The Science of the total environment,
02/2023, Letnik:
858, Številka:
Pt 3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Excess nitrogen deposition from anthropogenic sources of atmospheric emissions, such as agriculture and transportation, can have negative effects on natural environments. Designing effective ...conservation efforts requires knowledge of the contribution of individual sectors. This study utilizes a global atmospheric chemistry-transport model to quantify, for the first time, the contribution of global aviation NOx emissions to nitrogen deposition for 2005 and 2019. We find that aviation led to an additional 1.39 Tg of nitrogen deposited globally in 2019, up 72 % from 2005, with 67 % of each year's total occurring through wet deposition. In 2019, aviation was responsible for an average of 0.66 %, 1.13 %, and 1.61 % of modeled nitrogen deposition from all sources over Asia, Europe, and North America, respectively. These impacts are spatially widespread, with 56 % of deposition occurring over water. Emissions during the landing, taxi and takeoff (LTO) phases of flight are responsible for 8 % of aviation's nitrogen deposition impacts on average globally, and between 16 and 32 % over most land in regions with high aviation activity. Despite currently representing less than 1.2 % of nitrogen deposition globally, further growth of aviation emissions would result in increases in aviation's contribution to nitrogen deposition and associated critical loads.
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•Atmospheric model estimates spatially-resolved nitrogen deposition from aviation.•Aviation led to 1.39 Tg of N deposition globally in 2019, up 72 % from 2005.•0.7 % (Asia), 1.1 % (Europe), 1.6 % (North America) of N deposition is due to aviation.•N deposition from aviation is spatially widespread, with 56 % occurring over water.
The Natura 2000 network is a system of managed natural areas exclusively designed to protect Europe's most valuable and threatened species and habitats and covers 18.6% of its land area, and 8.9% of ...its marine territory. Repeated Eurobarometer public opinion surveys show that European citizens are unaware of this broad network. Awareness is a prerequisite to successful participatory planning. The present work addresses two issues. First, it reflects on the presumed “low” level of Natura 2000 recognition among Europeans using the citizens' knowledge of similar concepts as a yardstick. Second, it explores whether aware and non-aware citizens are systematically and characteristically different from each other regarding their human capital, social and economic attributes. Data are sourced from publicly available Eurobarometer surveys summing up to a large dataset of 52,000 respondents across all EU countries and regions. The statistical analysis utilises a random intercept, multilevel ordered logistic, regression model that considers the ordinal nature of the Natura 2000 awareness dependent variable and the fact that European respondents cluster in regions and countries. The results highlight that a higher awareness level is related to more privileged citizens and reveal a substantial gender issue, a cognitive rural-urban separation and, possibly, a generational predisposition. Findings also disclose the complex and obscure geography of awareness. The revealed “biased awareness” is a threat to successful public participation. Environmental policy must be proactive about testing new ways to support higher awareness levels and rise to the challenge of providing an improved and inclusive awareness-raising strategy.
•Natura 2000 awareness is low compared to issues like “biodiversity”.•The aware and non-aware groups of citizens are distinctively different.•Awareness rates reveal gender, rural-urban and generational differences.•The geography of awareness across European countries and regions is complex.•Conservation policy must draw a proactive and inclusive awareness-raising strategy.
Successful conservation needs to be informed by social science because it is closely linked to socio-economic processes and human behaviour. Limited knowledge about ecosystems' interactions with ...these processes currently undermines conservation efforts. This review provides a comprehensive synthesis of social science concerning the world's largest multinationally-coordinated conservation infrastructure: the European Ecological Network - ‘Natura 2000’. Based on a review of 149 publications, we analyse and discuss the main findings and outline key social-science research gaps with regard to the Natura 2000 network. The review shows that human dimension of the Natura 2000 network is complex and varies among EU Member States. In general, low level and quality of public participation in implementation of the Natura 2000 network and its management, negative public perceptions of the network, lack of flexibility of responsible authorities and insufficient consideration of the local context pose the greatest challenges to the network's functioning. Important but hitherto little studied research topics include: evaluation of participation; effects of education on potential to raise public awareness; effects of potential financing mechanisms for compensating private land-owners; economic studies on cost-effectiveness; and benefits from conservation and ecosystem services. These knowledge gaps will need to be filled for the Natura 2000 network to reach its goals.
•We review and synthesise social science on Natura 2000 and its implementation.•Key implementation obstacles are poor participation and negative perception.•Inflexible regulations and limited concern to local context add to the problem.•Few studies explore participation processes or examine awareness raising.•There is little economic research on Natura 2000 or focus on ecosystem services.
•Combining satellite and airborne remote sensing data outperforms single data sources for habitat mapping significantly.•Unbalanced reference data results in lower class accuracies for small classes, ...although the training samples are balanced.•Model-based habitat classification reveals reference data errors and habitat shifts.•Pixel-based habitat classification approach using remote sensing data works good for frequently present classes.
Mapping and monitoring of habitats are requirements for protecting biodiversity. In this study, we investigated the benefit of combining airborne (laser scanning, image-based point clouds) and satellite-based (Sentinel 1 and 2) data for habitat classification. We used a two level random forest 10-fold leave-location-out cross-validation workflow to model Natura 2000 forest and grassland habitat types on a 10 m pixel scale at two study sites in Vienna, Austria. We showed that models using combined airborne and satellite-based remote sensing data perform significantly better for forests than airborne or satellite-based data alone. For frequently occurring classes, we reached class accuracies with F1-scores from 0.60 to 0.87. We identified clear difficulties of correctly assigning rare classes with model-based classification. Finally, we demonstrated the potential of the workflow to identify errors in reference data and point to the opportunities for integration in habitat mapping and monitoring.
Natura 2000 (N2k) is a multinational and coordinated conservation network designated to support the long-term survival of Europe's most valuable species and habitats. It is the key conservation tool ...in the European Union. We reviewed 510 peer-reviewed publications (period 1998–2014) focusing on ecological aspects of N2k, with the aims of identifying key research gaps and proposing future research priorities for improved conservation success. We categorized the articles by spatial scale, biogeographical regions, taxonomic groups, habitat types, and the analytical methods used. The majority of studies were performed in single N2k sites or at the regional level within countries. The Mediterranean region had the greatest number of publications and the terrestrial Black Sea, Macaronesia, Pannonian and Steppic regions were overrepresented in relation to their total area and to the area of N2k sites that they comprised. Grasslands, freshwater and wetland habitats were overrepresented in comparison to their area within N2k. Plants were the most commonly studied taxonomic group and quantitative empirical studies dominated. Future N2k research should address knowledge gaps by directing more efforts towards: 1) the Boreal region, 2) alpine, agricultural, forest and marine habitats, and 3) underrepresented taxonomic groups such as reptiles, amphibians, lichens and fungi. For enhanced evaluation and realization of the conservation potential of N2k, more studies will need to encompass large spatial scales and utilize modelling approaches to effectively address future climate and land-use changes.
•We conducted a review of ecological research on Natura 2000 network.•Regional or single-site studies, and those from the Mediterranean region dominate.•Research gaps include alpine, agricultural, forest and marine habitats.•Underrepresented were reptiles, amphibians, lichens, fungi and Boreal region.•Future studies should focus on larger spatial scales and use modelling approaches.
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