• Energy Research

AbstractThe prosperity and well‐being of human societies relies on healthy ecosystems and the services they provide. However, the biodiversity crisis is undermining ecosystems services and functions. Vultures are among the most imperiled taxonomic groups on Earth, yet they have a fundamental ecosystem function. These obligate scavengers rapidly consume large amounts of carrion and human waste, a service that may aid in both disease prevention and control of mammalian scavengers, including feral dogs, which in turn threaten humans. We combined information about the distribution of all 15 vulture species found in Europe, Asia, and Africa with their threats and used detailed expert knowledge on threat intensity to prioritize critical areas for conserving vultures in Africa and Eurasia. Threats we identified included poisoning, mortality due to collision with wind energy infrastructures, and other anthropogenic activities related to human land use and influence. Areas important for vulture conservation were concentrated in southern and eastern Africa, South Asia, and the Iberian Peninsula, and over 80% of these areas were unprotected. Some vulture species required larger areas for protection than others. Finally, countries that had the largest share of all identified important priority areas for vulture conservation were those with the largest expenditures related to rabies burden (e.g., India, China, and Myanmar). Vulture populations have declined markedly in most of these countries. Restoring healthy vulture populations through targeted actions in the priority areas we identified may help restore the ecosystem services vultures provide, including sanitation and potentially prevention of diseases, such as rabies, a heavy burden afflicting fragile societies. Our findings may guide stakeholders to prioritize actions where they are needed most in order to achieve international goals for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.

Species’ range shifts and local extinctions caused by climate change lead to community composition changes. At large spatial scales, ecological barriers, such as biome boundaries, coastlines, and elevation, can influence a community's ability to shift in response to climate change. Yet, ecological barriers are rarely considered in climate change studies, potentially hindering predictions of biodiversity shifts. We used data from two consecutive European breeding bird atlases to calculate the geographic distance and direction between communities in the 1980s and their compositional best match in the 2010s and modeled their response to barriers. The ecological barriers affected both the distance and direction of bird community composition shifts, with coastlines and elevation having the strongest influence. Our results underscore the relevance of combining ecological barriers and community shift projections for identifying the forces hindering community adjustments under global change. Notably, due to (macro)ecological barriers, communities are not able to track their climatic niches, which may lead to drastic changes, and potential losses, in community compositions in the future.

Wind energy can harm birds through collision mortality, displacement, barrier to movements, and habitat loss or degradation with largely unknown consequences for their populations. Impact avoidance via appropriate site selection is the most effective means for preventing or alleviating damage from wind energy. Appropriate site selection requires a knowledge of landscape priorities. Here, we used a Spatial Conservation Prioritisation software to identify priority areas for bird conservation in relation to onshore wind energy in Finland, providing spatial guidance for impact avoidance at the national level. We showed that high bird priority areas are mainly concentrated in coastal and adjacent areas, thus entailing marked regional differences and responsibilities. Only a fraction of high priority areas (e.g., 15 % of 10 % top priority areas) is under some level of protection, indicating that the network of protected areas should be expanded to safeguard sensitive species. We found that the west coast, in particular, concentrates potential conflicts between birds and wind energy due to the co-occurrence of high priority areas and extensive wind energy development regionally. Thus, focusing conservation action away from areas already extensively targeted by wind energy cannot meet the conservation needs of many sensitive species, some of which occur exclusively or mainly in coastal areas. We recommend that birds be protected by avoiding construction in high priority areas and conducting careful spatial planning in coastal and potentially high conflict areas. Our results can contribute to bird conservation schemes, while addressing the pressing issue of biodiversity protection in the context of energy transition. FBC was funded by Otto A. Malm Foundation, Oskar Öflund Foundation and Svenska Österbottens Kulturfond, and AS by the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation through the Research Centre for Ecological Change. Peer reviewed

AbstractConservation of biodiversity relies heavily on protected areas but their role and effectiveness under a warming climate is still debated. We estimated the climate‐driven changes in the temperature niche compositions of bird communities inside and outside protected areas in southern Canada. We hypothesized that communities inside protected areas include a higher proportion of cold‐dwelling species than communities outside protected areas. We also hypothesized that communities shift to warm‐dwelling species more slowly inside protected areas than outside. To study community changes, we used large‐scale and long‐term (1997–2019) data from the Breeding Bird Survey of Canada. To describe the temperature niche compositions of bird communities, we calculated the community temperature index (CTI) annually for each community inside and outside protected areas. Generally, warm‐dwelling species dominated communities with high CTI values. We modeled temporal changes in CTI as a function of protection status with linear mixed‐effect models. We also determined which species contributed most to the temporal changes in CTI with a jackknife approach. As anticipated, CTI was lower inside protected areas than outside. However, contrary to our expectation, CTI increased faster over time inside than outside protected areas and warm‐dwelling species contributed most to CTI change inside protected areas. These results highlight the ubiquitous impacts of climate warming. Currently, protected areas can aid cold‐dwelling species by providing habitat, but as the climate warms, the communities’ temperature compositions inside protected areas quickly begin to resemble those outside protected areas, suggesting that protected areas delay the impacts of climate warming on cold‐dwelling species.

ABSTRACTSubterranean ecosystems are among the most widespread environments on Earth, yet we still have poor knowledge of their biodiversity. To raise awareness of subterranean ecosystems, the essential services they provide, and their unique conservation challenges, 2021 and 2022 were designated International Years of Caves and Karst. As these ecosystems have traditionally been overlooked in global conservation agendas and multilateral agreements, a quantitative assessment of solution‐based approaches to safeguard subterranean biota and associated habitats is timely. This assessment allows researchers and practitioners to understand the progress made and research needs in subterranean ecology and management. We conducted a systematic review of peer‐reviewed and grey literature focused on subterranean ecosystems globally (terrestrial, freshwater, and saltwater systems), to quantify the available evidence‐base for the effectiveness of conservation interventions. We selected 708 publications from the years 1964 to 2021 that discussed, recommended, or implemented 1,954 conservation interventions in subterranean ecosystems. We noted a steep increase in the number of studies from the 2000s while, surprisingly, the proportion of studies quantifying the impact of conservation interventions has steadily and significantly decreased in recent years. The effectiveness of 31% of conservation interventions has been tested statistically. We further highlight that 64% of the reported research occurred in the Palearctic and Nearctic biogeographic regions. Assessments of the effectiveness of conservation interventions were heavily biased towards indirect measures (monitoring and risk assessment), a limited sample of organisms (mostly arthropods and bats), and more accessible systems (terrestrial caves). Our results indicate that most conservation science in the field of subterranean biology does not apply a rigorous quantitative approach, resulting in sparse evidence for the effectiveness of interventions. This raises the important question of how to make conservation efforts more feasible to implement, cost‐effective, and long‐lasting. Although there is no single remedy, we propose a suite of potential solutions to focus our efforts better towards increasing statistical testing and stress the importance of standardising study reporting to facilitate meta‐analytical exercises. We also provide a database summarising the available literature, which will help to build quantitative knowledge about interventions likely to yield the greatest impacts depending upon the subterranean species and habitats of interest. We view this as a starting point to shift away from the widespread tendency of recommending conservation interventions based on anecdotal and expert‐based information rather than scientific evidence, without quantitatively testing their effectiveness.

There is broad consensus that increasing the use of renewable energies is effective to mitigate the global climate crisis. However, the development of renewables may carry environmental impacts, and their expansion could accelerate biodiversity loss (1). However, Dunnett et al. (2) have recently estimated a minimal overlap between renewable energy expansion and important conservation areas (ICAs;i.e., protected areas, key biodiversity areas, wilderness areas) (sensu ref. 2), suggesting that these infrastructures would not significantly affect biodiversity conservation if properly planned and regulated. Peer reviewed