Search

The wolf (Canis lupus) is used as a case study to rate Natura 2000 sites in Greece based on preferred wolf habitat characteristics and test whether the network is suitable for their conservation. Road density, agricultural area, site area, connectivity, food availability (i.e., presence of natural prey), and elevation in 237 sites are combined in a logistic regression model. The occurrence of the wolf's natural prey was the most prevalent factor determining wolf presence, followed by agricultural cover. Considering the current status of these features at N2K site level, most sites currently hosting wolves (85.7%) have good or excellent prospects for the long-term presence of the wolf. On the contrary, 11 sites which now have wolves are predicted to be ineffective in keeping them in the future due to the absence of wild ungulates and their high agricultural coverage. Four sites with no wolf presence currently have excellent prospects to host wolves in the future. Roadless sites are a priority for protection and retaining their current condition is strongly suggested. The proposed approach aims to detect gaps in protection for the wolf and identify priority sites in need of mitigation actions. It can also assist the assessment of conservation policies in Greece and elsewhere toward accomplishing set goals in protected areas. By focusing on wolf protection, we hope to increase agencies' attention to deal with conservation effectiveness, especially in cases like Greece, where a number of sites are insufficiently known and protected and management measures are not properly implemented.

Considering the wide growth of the wind turbine market over the last decade as well as their increasing power size, more and more potential conflicts have arisen in society due to the noise radiated by these plants. Our goal was to determine whether the annoyance caused by wind farms is related to aspects other than noise. To accomplish this, an auditory experiment on the recognition of wind turbine noise was conducted to people with long experience of wind turbine noise exposure and to people with no previous experience to this type of noise source. Our findings demonstrated that the trend of the auditory recognition is the same for the two examined groups, as far as the increase of the distance and the decrease of the values of sound equivalent levels and loudness are concerned. Significant differences between the two groups were observed as the distance increases. People with wind turbine noise experience showed a higher tendency to report false alarms than people without experience.

Human health and well-being presuppose environmental quality. Several studies have documented the indicative role of land use types in environmental quality. However, the exact role of land use composition on disease distribution has remained scientifically vague. We assessed the congruence of diseases' distribution with land use composition, focusing on high environmental quality areas, defined as tranquil areas with view to indicating places offering well-being. Landscape composition is linked to the presence of diseases across 51 prefectures of Greece. Agricultural and natural land use types proved to be the main drivers of disease distribution. Tranquility demonstrated a strong negative correlation with population density, thus could be considered as a quantitative spatial index of life-quality. We concluded that the landscape context affects the dominance of diseases' patterns. Special emphasis should be put on the role of tranquil areas in human health and the relative environmental health policies.

The Natura 2000 network was established across the European Union's (EU) Member States with the aim to conserve biodiversity, while ensuring the sustainability of human activities. However, to what kind and to what extent Natura 2000 sites are subject to human activities and how this varies across Member States remains unspecified. Here, we analyzed 111,269 human activity records from 14,727 protected sites in 20 Member States. The frequency of occurrence of activities differs among countries, with more than 86 % of all sites being subjected to agriculture or forestry. Activities like hunting, fishing, urbanization, transportation, and tourism are more frequently recorded in south European sites than in northern or eastern ones. The observed variations indicate that Natura 2000 networks are highly heterogeneous among EU Member States. Our analysis highlights the importance of agriculture in European landscapes and indicates possible targets for policy interventions at national, European, or "sub-European" level. The strong human presence in the Natura 2000 network throughout Member States, shows that conservation initiatives could succeed only by combining social and ecological sustainability and by ensuring the integration of policies affecting biodiversity.

Variations in environmental parameters (e.g. temperature) that form part of global climate change have been associated with shifts in the timing of seasonal events for a broad range of organisms. Most studies evaluating such phenological shifts of individual taxa have focused on a limited number of locations, making it difficult to assess how such shifts vary regionally across a species range. Here, by using 1445 records of the date of first nesting for loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) at different breeding sites, on different continents and in different years across a broad latitudinal range (25-39° 'N), we demonstrate that the gradient of the relationship between temperature and the date of first breeding is steeper at higher latitudes, i.e. the phenological responses to temperature appear strongest at the poleward range limit. These findings support the hypothesis that biological changes in response to climate change will be most acute at the poleward range limits and are in accordance with the predictions of MacArthur's hypothesis that poleward range limit for species range is environmentally limited. Our findings imply that the poleward populations of loggerheads are more sensitive to climate variations and thus they might display the impacts of climate change sooner and more prominently.

Climate and land use changes are major threats to biodiversity. To preserve biodiversity, networks of protected areas have been established worldwide, like the Natura 2000 network across the European Union (EU). Currently, this reserve network consists of more than 26000 sites covering more than 17% of EU terrestrial territory. Its efficiency to mitigate the detrimental effects of land use and climate change remains an open research question. Here, we examined the potential current and future geographical ranges of four birds of prey under scenarios of both land use and climate changes. By using graph theory, we examined how the current Natura 2000 network will perform in regard to the conservation of these species. This approach determines the importance of a site in regard to the total network and its connectivity. We found that sites becoming unsuitable due to climate change are not a random sample of the network, but are less connected and contribute less to the overall connectivity than the average site and thus their loss does not disrupt the full network. Hence, the connectivity of the remaining network changed only slightly from present day conditions. Our findings highlight the need to establish species-specific management plans with flexible conservation strategies ensuring protection under potential future range expansions. Aquila pomarina is predicted to disappear from the southern part of its range and to become restricted to northeastern Europe. Gyps fulvus, Aquila chrysaetos, and Neophron percnopterus are predicted to locally lose some suitable sites; hence, some isolated small populations may become extinct. However, their geographical range and metapopulation structure will remain relatively unaffected throughout Europe. These species would benefit more from an improved habitat quality and management of the existing network of protected areas than from increased connectivity or assisted migration.

1. Reproductive fitness is often compromised at the margins of a species' range due to sub-optimal conditions. 2. Set against this backdrop, the Mediterranean's largest loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) rookery at Zakynthos (Greece) presents a conundrum, being at a very high latitude for this species, yet hosting a high concentration of nesting. 3. We used visual surveys combined with global positioning system (GPS) tracking to show that at the start of the breeding season, individuals showed microhabitat selection, with females residing in transient patches of warm water. As the sea warmed in the summer, this selection was no longer evident. 4. As loggerhead turtles are ectothermic, this early season warm-water selection presumably speeds up egg maturation rates before oviposition, thereby allowing more clutches to be incubated when sand conditions are optimal during the summer. 5. Active selection of warm waters may allow turtles to initiate nesting at an earlier date.

We analysed the dynamics of a plant-pollinator interaction network of a scrub community surveyed over four consecutive years. Species composition within the annual networks showed high temporal variation. Temporal dynamics were also evident in the topology of the network, as interactions among plants and pollinators did not remain constant through time. This change involved both the number and the identity of interacting partners. Strikingly, few species and interactions were consistently present in all four annual plant-pollinator networks (53% of the plant species, 21% of the pollinator species and 4.9% of the interactions). The high turnover in species-to-species interactions was mainly the effect of species turnover (c. 70% in pairwise comparisons among years), and less the effect of species flexibility to interact with new partners (c. 30%). We conclude that specialization in plant-pollinator interactions might be highly overestimated when measured over short periods of time. This is because many plant or pollinator species appear as specialists in 1 year, but tend to be generalists or to interact with different partner species when observed in other years. The high temporal plasticity in species composition and interaction identity coupled with the low variation in network structure properties (e.g. degree centralization, connectance, nestedness, average distance and network diameter) imply (i) that tight and specialized coevolution might not be as important as previously suggested and (ii) that plant-pollinator interaction networks might be less prone to detrimental effects of disturbance than previously thought. We suggest that this may be due to the opportunistic nature of plant and animal species regarding the available partner resources they depend upon at any particular time.