Improving the cost-effectiveness of European Biodiversity Monitoring
Tom Breeze
The loss of biodiversity presents a serious risk to ecological and human wellbeing. One of the major challenges in developing effective responses has been the lack of good quality data on trends in biodiversity. This talk will present the challenges that European Biodiversity monitoring faces, both technical and financial, and outline how these have shaped the upcoming EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme and how emerging technologies can help address these challenges.
Understanding biodiversity responses to climate and landscape change across spatial scales
Laura Bosco
Global biodiversity declines are driven not only by climate change but also by habitat loss and fragmentation. Together, these factors influence species' ability to respond to rapid climate change, depending on their traits and the structure of the landscape through e.g. habitat availability and fragmentation. In this talk I will review how species respond to climate and landscape change in various ways, discuss how the “scale of effect” plays into this and what implications we can draw for biodiversity conservation. I will mainly focus on recent results from our ongoing project on the combined effect of habitat loss, fragmentation and climate change where we use large-scale and long-term breeding bird data from citizen-science programs.
Saving freshwater biodiversity: Sustainable water management and land use design in the Anthropocene
Tibor Erős
One of the greatest challenges facing society today is halting the global decline of biodiversity while preserving the capacity of ecosystem services essential for human well-being. This talk presents a framework that strategically applies spatial conservation and landscape planning approaches to selecting conservation areas with a particular focus on freshwater ecosystems. The framework directly integrates and optimizes river conservation and connectivity restoration planning, helping conservation managers better account for connectivity restoration in critically fragmented river networks. As a result, it supports more effective catchment-scale maintenance of biological integrity and the delivery of vital ecosystem services.