Context: Recent large and high-severity wildfires have burned vast areas of coniferous forests throughout Western North America. These burned landscapes are recovering amid increasingly frequent climate extremes, such as drought. We need to understand how post-fire climate extremes and other ecological drivers (such as fire impacts) influence patterns and trends of coniferous recovery.
Objectives: We worked at a landscape scale (> 400,000 hectares) to investigate the association between distinct post-fire forest recovery and ecological drivers in dry sub-boreal forests. We created structural recovery groups distinct in patterns and trends of coniferous cover and density and then modeled their association with ecological drivers.
Methods: We used Landsat time-series data to identify unique spectral recovery, which we grouped based on post-fire regrowth and stocking estimates. Remotely Piloted Aircraft light detection and ranging (lidar) provided structural estimates 5-21 years post-fire. We modeled the association between structural recovery groups and ecological drivers with random forests. For each category of drivers (site conditions, climate, climate anomalies, pre-fire composition, and fire impacts), we used individual models to identify important drivers. We then incorporated the most important drivers in a global model to highlight the drivers that were important across categories.
Results: Initial spectral trends indicated longer-term differences in structural forest recovery. Climate anomalies (such as post-fire extremes in temperature and precipitation) and pre-fire basal area best predicted observed structural groupings-abnormally cold and dry summers after the fire were associated with slow conifer establishment. Comparatively, areas with a higher pre-fire basal area maintained a mixed canopy of deciduous and coniferous stems.
Conclusions: At a landscape scale, post-fire climate conditions best predicted structural forest recovery, suggesting management plans should be adaptable to the conditions experienced post fire.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-025-02266-y.
Context: While biodiversity decline is undebated on the global level, landscape-scale trends are poorly known and local assemblages even show stable species richness, accompanied by pronounced turn-over. The landscape-scale consequences of local-scale species turnover likely depend on whether species replacement is random or biased towards more frequent species in the metacommunity, but this potential bias is insufficiently studied.
Objectives: Here, we use grassland ecosystems of a Central European national park to simultaneously analyse time-series of local-scale species richness and landscape-scale species incidence to better understand how trends are linked at these two scales.
Methods: From 2013 to 2024 we sampled 120 plots per year and used regression methods to quantify changes in the number of species per assemblage, the incidence of species across assemblages and the relationship between initial incidence of species and incidence trends. To explore possible drivers of change, we further evaluated trends of community means of environmental indicator values.
Results: We found that local species richness has increased within the study period from 18 species per plot in 2013 to 21 species in 2024, while the overall number of species sampled per year stayed the same. In contrast, when looking at individual species trends we found an average decline of species' incidence in the region. While a small pool of already common species became more frequent, the majority of species became rarer, leading to a pronounced homogenization of plant communities on the sampled sites. Indicator-value analysis showed that the species turnover was mainly influenced by desiccation of grasslands, significantly biassing incidence changes towards species that prefer drier conditions.
Conclusions: We conclude that in typical Central-European grassland ecosystems, anthropogenic drivers rather decrease landscape-scale than local-scale biodiversity, because they tend to homogenize environmental conditions. The resulting species turn-over can stabilize local species richness but depletes the metacommunity, thereby posing future risks to the regional biodiversity.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-025-02256-0.
Context: Understanding the roles of different drivers in land use and land cover change (LULCC) is a critical research challenge. However, as LULCC is the result of complex, socio-ecological processes and is highly context dependent, achieving such understanding is difficult. This is particularly true for causal modelling approaches that are critical for effective policy formulation. Causal machine learning (ML) methods could help address this challenge, but are as yet poorly understood or applied by the LULCC community.
Objectives: To provide an accessible introduction to the state of the art for causal ML methods, their limitations, and their potential applications understanding LULCC.
Methods: We conducted two workshops where we identified the most promising ML methods for increasing understanding of LULCC dynamics.
Results: We provide a brief overview of the challenges to causal modelling of LULCC, including a simple example, and the most relevant causal ML approaches for addressing these challenges, as well as their limitations.
Conclusions: Causal ML methods hold considerable promise for improving causal modelling of LULCC. However, the complexity of LULCC dynamics mean that such methods must be combined with domain understanding and qualitative insights for effective policy design.
Context: Theoretical research has considered how animals should optimise foraging strategies to maximise fitness, adapting search scale to exploit different habitats and minimise competition. Empirical studies have described multi-scale area-restricted search (ARS) strategies for some species, but the physical and biological mechanisms underpinning such behaviour are rarely studied.
Objectives: Our objectives were to quantify the presence, prevalence, and habitat associations of scale-dependent foraging for two sympatric seal species, accounting for regional variation across the seascape.
Methods: We analyse a GPS telemetry dataset of 116 grey (Halichoerus grypus) and 325 harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) tracked throughout the North Sea. We test the existence of multi-scale ARS, comparing hidden Markov models (HMMs) with two ARS states against more conventional HMMs (one ARS state). We quantify regional variation and examine the scale-dependence of foraging habitat associations using post-hoc "use-encounter" models.
Results: Both species exhibited nested broad-scale and focussed ARS. Accounting for scale resulted in increases of up to 25% and 46% in inferred ARS for grey and harbour seals respectively. The prevalence and habitat associations of different ARS scales varied in a regional species-specific manner.
Conclusions: We demonstrate the first application of HMMs to capture multi-scale ARS from animal-borne tracking data. Overlooking scale-dependence may mask individual variation and underestimate ARS, with consequences for ecological understanding and conservation applications. We hypothesise that seals employ different search scales for different habitats, competition levels and/or prey types. We call for further research to elucidate the prevalence and ecological significance of this phenomenon in other aquatic predators.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-025-02281-z.
Context: Urban greenspaces are increasingly recognized for their multifunctionality-the capacity to provide diverse ecological and social benefits. Yet, planning strategies often focus on greenspace availability and accessibility, overlooking the functional and structural diversity within and among urban greenspaces. Traditional hotspot-based approaches typically prioritize areas with high richness, while overlooking rare and unique features that, despite their low abundance, may be critical to overall multifunctionality.
Objective: With a focus on park amenities, this study explored the unique capabilities of Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP) for evaluating the diversity and complementarity of recreational opportunities in a region-wide urban park system. We further integrated mobility considerations to offer a more nuanced approach to greenspace monitoring. We asked: How do different measures of accessibility and mobility shape selection of park portfolios?
Methods: As a proof-of-concept, we adapted a SCP approach, often used in biodiversity conservation, to identify greenspace portfolios in the City of Surrey, BC, Canada, a region with detailed mapping of diverse park amenities. Two contrasting scales of accessibility (neighborhood blocks vs. pixel-based) were used as constraints, and then evaluated under varying mobility (i.e. travel distance) assumptions.
Results: We found finer scale (i.e. pixel-based) accessibility measures captured portfolios with a greater proportion of urban park amenities (80-100%) compared to block-level measures (1-67%), and also selected more spatially aggregated portfolios across the city. Irreplaceability patterns-indicating the parks most critical for diverse recreational amenities-varied depending on how accessibility was quantified. Lastly, more neighbourhoods were included in park portfolios as mobility (travel) distance increased, but this growth was non-linear.
Conclusion: Our work demonstrates SCP's potential as a valuable tool for planning and evaluating urban greenspace recreational opportunities. It offers a proof-of-concept for applying spatial prioritization in urban contexts, and can be feasibly expanded to include many additional aspects of park multi-functionality. Use of finer-scale measures of accessibility (as a cost constraint), and different mobility (i.e. travel distance) assumptions, further enhanced the selection of park portfolios that can provide diverse recreational opportunities.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-026-02311-4.
Context: Connectivity across river networks facilitates species movement and ecological processes that contribute to freshwater biodiversity. Certain indices provide measures of connectivity to focus conservation planning.
Objectives: Our objective was to test whether commonly used connectivity indicators based on network structure can reliably predict population persistence.
Methods: We used a spatially explicit metapopulation model for freshwater fish that complete their life cycle entirely within river networks and depend on connectivity for movement. Simulations were conducted across a range of network sizes, topologies, dispersal abilities, and barrier passabilities. We assessed the relationship between the Dendritic Connectivity Index (DCI) and metrics of persistence at the network and the reach scale.
Results: DCI was strongly correlated with persistence at both the network and reach scale across most simulated network sizes and configurations, particularly in dendritic (branching) systems with symmetric barrier passability. At the network scale, correlations were strongest with density-independent persistence metrics, which is expected since DCI does not incorporate population interactions. Species dispersal ability influenced DCI-persistence correlations differently across scales: correlations were strongest at the network scale when dispersal distances spanned the full network (global dispersal) and at the reach scale when movement was limited to neighbouring segments (local dispersal). We also found that increases in DCI following simulated barrier removal were associated with improvements in persistence, further demonstrating its potential to support restoration efforts.
Conclusion: Indicators like DCI can inform connectivity-focused conservation planning in river networks.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-025-02278-8.
Context: Excess fine sediment is a global stressor affecting freshwater biodiversity. However, little consideration has been given to how large-scale landscape controls and temporal variability may influence the effect of fine sediment deposition and storage on biological communities.
Objectives: We assess if ecological responses to deposited fine sediment are spatially and temporally consistent through the application of the river typology approach.
Methods: We used 2,940 records from 391 wadable streams across England and Wales to identify taxonomic and functional community composition change points, in addition to individual family responses along the fine sediment gradient. We also examined the association of taxonomic and functional community diversity metrics and biomonitoring metrics with deposited fine sediment coverage.
Results: Mid-altitude rivers displayed a lower community threshold (~ < 10% fine sediment cover) of deposited fine sediment before the majority of community change occurred, whilst lowland rivers were more tolerant (20-25%). Critically, we found that both mid-altitude river types demonstrated no association with two fine sediment stressor-specific metrics and that some community metrics displayed a positive association with increasing fine sediment cover.
Conclusions: Community and family level responses to deposited fine sediment are non-linear, which can be characterized effectively by river typologies and most notably altitude groupings. Low levels of deposited fine sediment may not act as a stressor in mid-altitude catchments as these may be resource limited. Our research underlines the need to consider context-specific effects of fine-grained sedimentation rather than seeking to generalise stressor effects.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-026-02297-z.
Context: Urban wildlife habitats are often fragmented and of poor quality, yet cities hold potential to support biodiversity, particularly for small-bodied species like insect pollinators. Enhancing habitat connectivity is essential for improving biodiversity and increasingly prioritised in planning frameworks. Combining diverse approaches to assess habitat connectivity may yield the greatest overall success.
Objectives: We compare two multi-species modelling approaches for assessing urban ecological corridors. The first species-specific approach uses combined habitat suitability maps of four insect pollinators and assesses connectivity using resistance modelling (circuit theory). The second landscape-level approach has been developed by urban environmental planners ("Green Network Development officers") and identifies core areas as species-rich habitat patches using spatial data, species records (of plant and pollinator indicator species), and local expertise, then models connectivity between these using least-cost paths. By comparing these two approaches, we aim to identify gaps and priority areas for habitat creation or management.
Methods: Using biological records, we mapped habitat suitability for pollinators and applied circuit theory to assess connectivity and identify "pinch points"-bottlenecks to movement that can be targeted for corridor enhancement.
Results: While both approaches showed 39 km2 of overlap, 31 pinch points-often centred around core pollinator habitat-were outside the corridors identified by Green Network Development officers. These areas could be prioritised in future iterations of the ecological network.
Conclusions: Our species-specific modelling approach identified 31 pinch points outside of planner-defined corridors, highlighting important areas of movement constraint not captured by the current planning framework. Incorporating species-specific modelling into urban planning also helps identify key habitat variables impeding movement, enhancing the biological understanding of the system. We recommend urban planners adopt multiple, complementary approaches for corridor delineation and collaborate with researchers, ecologists, and citizen scientists.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-026-02315-0.
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