Where are Europe’s last wild forests?

When thinking of untouched forests, many of us immediately go with our thoughts to the Sequoia groves in California, the magnificent mountain ash forests in Tasmania or to the endless stretches of trees in the Amazon. Well, you will be surprised then to know that Europe still hosts some hidden treasures, patches of forest where signs of human impacts are minimal and where today’s big veteran trees were young saplings at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Well, the good news is that we have finally mapped these forests across the entire Europe and have just published the results in the scientific journal Diversity and Distribution.

Picture credits: Fraktos forest – Rodopi Mountain Range National Park – Greece
Photo: F.M. Sabatini

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Mapping the extinction debt in the Chaco

Although my heart beats for temperate forests, collaborating with Asunción Semper-Pascual took me for once (alas, only figuratively) to the tropical dry forests of the Argentinian Chaco, to do research on a very important questions:

Given the high rate of deforestation currently observed in the Chaco, what proportion of the mammal and bird diversity we currently observe in the landscape is deemed to go extinct in the near-future? In other words, is there an Extinction debt? And can we map it to highlight areas where a high extinction rate is expected, so to priotize areas in urgent need of restoration?

In the paper just published on the Journal of Applied Ecology, we showed we can.

Why burning forests for Energy may not be a good idea. Flaws in the revised EU renewable energy Directive

The European Union is about to release a revised version of the Directive on renewable energy. The directive aims at doubling the current production of renewable energy by 2030, i.e. the provision of solar, wind, hydroelectric and bioenergy energy. Renewable is ‘good’, so it seems we are undertaking a new step towards sustainability and a green future- All really noble, but are we sure we are doing the right thing?

Of Beta-diversity and its decrease with increasing elevation

Credits – Valerio Giacomini (1958) La Flora – Conosci L’italia, Touring Club Italiano. Milano

It’s a fact. Biodiversity is not uniformly distributed over the Earth’s surface. Some regions are lush with a rich, heterogeneous flora, others are homogeneously covered by only a few plant species. A recurrent pattern is the decrease of the number of animal and plant species from the equator to the poles, as well as from to low to high elevation. What happens when rather than considering the number of species, one focuses on the variability in species composition (=beta-diversity) and compares this variability across geographical regions?

We have just published a new study in Ecography to understand how beta-diversity varies along elevation gradients. There is evidence that, similarly to species richness, beta-diversity also decreases with increasing elevation and latitude. But what are the mechanisms behind this pattern?

Conference for protection of old growth forest in Europe – We go, do You?

There’s a lot of stir around old-growth forests lately. After spending the last two years collecting data about their distribution in Europe (not just on old-growth to be sincere, but I don’t want to reopen the terminological Pandora box), performing a massive literature review, bothering hundreds of forest experts all over the continent, and building a network of researchers willing to share their data, we think we can say a word or two on the topic. It seems that some agencies, institutions, and NGOs are also starting to realize that, if you want to protect the last old-growth forest of Europe, you need to know where they are. That’s why the NGO Wild Europe got in touch with us and invited us to contribute to the Conference for the protection of old-growth forest in Europe (Brussels, 13-14th September 2017).

Wild Europe defines this ‘A conference for practical action’. The idea is to gather all the people interested in the protection of old-growth forests to agree on practical actions that address all aspects of an agenda to protect and restore old-growth forests. In short, develop a protection strategy, and find a way to implement it. Of course, to protect something, you first need to know where it is. So, Wild Europe invited us to present our ‘Map of primary forests of Europe’ over the conference. We will give some anticipations of our findings, waiting for the scientific paper to be published in the scientific literature.

See you there?

 

 

Thanks for your invitation to review – but…

What if I told you that there’s an industry that relies on the customer’s free-of-charge labour for the selection of products to be sold, the production itself as well as quality management, and that this industry is even able to sell the ‘products’ produced this way to the same customers for an exorbitant price and earning a huge profit?

You would say that something is wrong.

Forest WG Workshop @ Carpathians Convention

Credits: Ana Marin, University of Malaga

Inventorying and mapping virgin forests in Europe is not just an interesting research exercise, or a conservation priority. In regions such as the Carpathians, where a considerable fraction of European virgin forest still can be found, the identification and protection of primary forests is formally required by an important regional international treaty. We’re referring to the Carpathian Convention. Signed in May 2003 by seven Carpathian States (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Ukraine), the Carpathian Convention recognizes at the Art. 10 of the Protocol on Sustainable Forest management that ‘Each Party shall take measures in its national territory aimed at identifying  and protecting natural, especially virgin forests of the Carpathians […]’. In this context, the mapping effort of FORESTS&CO could not pass unobserved by the Secretariat of the Carpathian Convention (SCC).

LIFE+ FAGUS – Project of the month

Venacquaro Valley, Gran Sasso National Park. Ph. D. Di Santo

Here’s another piece of news relative the LIFE+ project – FAGUS, a project I collaborated with from 2013-2015. The Italian Ministry of the Environment elected FAGUS as Project of the Month – Jan 2017, and published a long press release summarizing objectives, actions and achievements of FAGUS.

The press release can be found at the url (only in Italian, unfortunately):

http://www.minambiente.it/pagina/progetti-del-mese

Congratulations to all the staff of FAGUS!

Afforestation, Common Agricultural Policy and Biodiversity

Tuesday 11 Oct 2017, the staff of Radio Colonia, the show in Italian language of the German Radio station Funkhaus Europa, interviewed Sabina Burrascano our colleague from Sapienza, University of Rome, on the content of our latest paper titled: ‘Current European policies are unlikely to jointly foster carbon sequestration and protect biodiversity‘.

Listen to the interview (in Italian) on Radio Colonia:

 See also the description of the study in a recent blog post.

Conflicting EU policies may hamper biodiversity conservation without mitigating climate change

Photo credits: Sabina Burrascano

We’ve just published a new paper: ‘Current European policies are unlikely to jointly foster carbon sequestration and protect biodiversity‘ on ‘Biological Conservation’ together with an international, interdisciplinary research group from five universities.

Is there the risk that European carbon policies may threaten grassland biodiversity? In the paper we raised the concern that carbon centered policies favouring one land-use (i.e. forest) over another (e.g. semi-natural grasslands) may not only fail at delivering the expected environmental benefits, but also create severe shortcomings, when biodiversity or other unique ecosystem services are considered. Given the context of high scientific uncertainty, we asked, what’s the situation in Europe? Do the current environmental policy acknowledge these uncertainties and balance coherently different environmental goals?

Err… not exactly…