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Achieving global restoration targets poses challenges including the need for long-term research and effective monitoring of success, fostering collaborations across diverse fields and actors, ensuring the availability of suitable reference ecosystems, and securing sustained funding. Yet, these conditions are often lacking, limiting the effectiveness of restoration. We provide an overview of ecological restoration practices in the pan-European region of the Long-term Ecological Research Network (eLTER) and demonstrate the importance of eLTER and its potential contributions to support the implementation of the EU Nature Restoration Law. We developed an online questionnaire to collect information on eLTER restoration experts and restoration projects details including the use of eLTER contributions (e.g. infrastructure, data and knowledge), between November 2021 and March 2022. We identified 62 restoration experts and 42 restoration projects from 18 countries. Our results show that eLTER restoration expertise covers most of the European habitats, diverse degradation states and restoration techniques. Most restoration projects (78%) involved long-term monitoring exceeding the average project lifespan, which has proven necessary to achieve restoration success. No common protocol was used for monitoring and evaluation or cost-benefit estimates, but respondents reported effective projects, mostly financed from national funds, and benefits in five ecosystem services on average covered per project. Key eLTER contributions included providing reference ecosystems, biotic and abiotic background data, and interdisciplinary discussion or stakeholder management. Ecological restoration is time intensive and requires long-term research and monitoring standardization to fully understand the restoration process and to ensure comparability across ecosystems. The eLTER network can help address these challenges providing added-value contributions through its infrastructure, long-term datasets, diversity of expertise and strategies that can help identify best restoration practices and support the EU Nature Restoration Law. Finally, additional and long-term funding from the EU and the private sector is needed to achieve global larger-scale restoration targets., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Hydro-morphological threats impact the natural physical characteristics of river ecosystems, such as flow regimes, sediment transport, and channel morphology. These negative effects can occur at multiple scales, ranging from local microhabitats to geographic regions. Understanding these interactions can be useful for an integrated conservation approach and is needed for effective freshwater management. The aim of the study was to elucidate the combined effects of hydro-morphological threats on macroinvertebrates at three spatial scales: macroscale, including whole catchments, mesoscale (hydro-morphological changes in individual river sections) and the microscale, describing the microhabitat conditions of European rivers. The diversity and trophic structure of 1120 local macroinvertebrate communities in 28 catchments of various hydro-morphological disturbance levels, ranging from 0 to 2400 m asl, were analyzed. The response of macroinvertebrates to the main disturbance gradient differed between mountain and lowland communities. Random forest analysis indicated that the most important predictor of the ecological, diversity, and trophic indices was described by flow rate reduction. Generalized additive mixed models showed that decreased flow combined with river incision explained most of the variation in macroinvertebrate indices. Our results emphasize that based on multi-spatial scale analysis, hydro-morphological threats are very important factors in invertebrates biodiversity loss. Thus, to implement effective river management, we should pay more attention to the combined effects of geomorphological threats., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Deadwood is a key old-growth element in European forests and a cornerstone of biodiversity conservation practices in the region, recognized as an important indicator of sustainable forest management. Despite its importance as a legacy element for biodiversity, uncertainties remain on the drivers of deadwood potentials, its spatial distribution in European forests and how it may change in the future due to management and climate change. To fill this gap, we combined a comprehensive deadwood dataset to fit a machine learning and a Bayesian hurdle-lognormal model against multiple environmental and socio-economic predictors. We deployed the models on the gridded predictors to forecast changes in deadwood volumes in Europe under alternative climate (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) and management scenarios (biodiversity-oriented and production-oriented strategies). Our results show deadwood hotspots in montane forests of central Europe and unmanaged forests in Scandinavia. Future climate conditions may reduce deadwood potentials up to 13% under a mid-century climate, with regional losses amounting to up to 22% in Southern Europe. Nevertheless, changes in management towards more biodiversity-oriented strategies, including an increase in the share of mixed forests and extended rotation lengths, may mitigate this loss to a 4% reduction in deadwood potentials. We conclude that adaptive management can promote deadwood under changing environmental conditions and thereby support habitat maintenance and forest multifunctionality., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

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. We conducted a study in Catalonia (NE Spain), where we collected management measures implemented between 2013 and 2018, including allocation, budget, pressures aimed, and habitats/species potentially benefiting. We integrated information on pressures and habitats/species with the measures to identify non-spatial management gaps. Then, we integrated the spatially explicit information to determine the spatial management gap, identifying geographical areas where species/habitats are under pressure without registered measures. We demonstrated the importance of integrating existing information. Our findings revealed that resources were often not distributed adequately across species/habitats, with biases towards certain taxa being a common issue. The non-spatial management gap analysis identified taxonomic groups, especially plants and mollusks with the wider management gaps. We also identified threatened areas, especially in the northeast of the region with the larger spatial management gaps. These results could guide priority objectives to optimize conservation efforts. Integrating different information sources provided a broader view of the challenges that conservation science is facing nowadays. Our study offers a path toward bending the curve of biodiversity loss by providing an integrative framework that could optimize the use of the available information and help narrow the knowing-doing gap. In the context of the EU, this example demonstrates how information can be used to promote some environmental policy instruments, such as the Prioritized Action Frameworks (PAFs). Additionally, our findings highlight the importance of supporting decision-making with systematic assessments to identify deficiencies in the conservation process, reduce the loss of critical ecosystems and species, and avoid biases among taxa., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)