Abstract 1. Global restoration targets, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the European Union’s Nature Restoration Regulation, call for extending restoration beyond protected area boundaries to reconnect isolated ecosystems, yet implementing these landscape-scale interventions forces trade-offs between biophysical effectiveness and social feasibility. 2. In the Grenoble region of the French Alps, we used a gradient analysis of 12 ecosystem services across protected area interfaces to design and compare two restoration scenarios. Both were built from the same set of co-selected interventions but differed only in their spatial allocation: a ‘Technical’ scenario targeting areas of low ecosystem service continuity around protected areas, and a ‘Participatory’ scenario co-designed with local stakeholders. 3. Both scenarios physically modified about 14.5% of the landscape, mostly through a forest-based adaptation strategy, yet their effects reached up to more than 60% of the territory for the most connectivity-dependent services, showing that benefits propagate well beyond the area directly modified. 4. The two scenarios diverged mainly in how they treated agricultural land. The Technical scenario reduced abrupt drops in ecosystem service provision at the protected area edge nearly twice as often as the Participatory one (46% versus 26% of the sharp declines it addressed), and at six locations removed them entirely. However, it concentrated over 99% of its non-forest effort in agricultural diversification, such as diversifying crops and adding hedgerows, the action stakeholders ranked hardest to implement, whereas the Participatory scenario favoured more feasible actions such as river restoration, which met less resistance but missed several critical discontinuities in ecosystem service supply. 5. These contrasts show that biophysical potential and social feasibility can pull restoration in different directions, and that the more effective spatial configuration is not necessarily the more implementable one. 6. Closing the implementation gap for nature-based solutions depended less on expanding the area restored than on where interventions were placed. Gradient-based diagnostics appear most useful not as fixed prescriptions but as tools to steer existing sectoral funding in agriculture, urban planning and forestry toward high-impact locations, an approach transferable to other regions working to reconnect protected areas with their surrounding landscapes as coupled social-ecological systems.
Climate change and land-use changes are key drivers of global biodiversity loss. Many species are shifting to higher elevations or latitudes in response to global warming, often encountering unfavorable land-use conditions during the shift. These changes can lead to reduced range size and increased extinction risks, particularly for mountain species that are often confined to narrow high-altitude habitats. Predicting future distributions of mountain species requires accounting for their bioclimatic responses, topographical distribution, land-use preferences, and ability to colonize new areas via dispersal. We projected the future distribution of 34 mountain mammal and 361 nonmigratory mountain bird species in 2050 under different emission scenarios. Using species distribution models (SDMs) that incorporated topography, climate, and land-use data, we assessed the impacts of global change on species' ranges across mountain regions worldwide and compared different emission scenarios to clarify the contributions of climate, land-use change, and dispersal to shaping future distributions. Species were projected to experience greater range loss under the high-emissions scenario than under the low-emissions scenario (16% higher on average). Dispersal played a key role in range shifts: when dispersal was included in the model, the number of birds that shifted their range increased by 144%. The most severe range losses were projected for species located in Central and South America and Oceania, whereas European mountains showed fewer losses, highlighting substantial regional differences in vulnerability. When land use was also considered, range dynamics remained stable, showing climate as the primary driver of mountain species distribution change. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering dispersal capacity when assessing climatic biodiversity risks in mountains. Our results highlight the urgency of applying regional strategies to establish ecological corridors, improve connectivity, and manage habitats to conserve the unique biodiversity of mountains.
Predicting marine species distribution and abundance is essential for effective conservation and management. Yet, it remains challenging in data-limited regions where traditional biodiversity surveys are logistically or financially constrained. Combining underwater visual census and eDNA fish sampling across the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, we tested a novel modelling framework that uses eDNA metabarcoding sequences to complement socio-environmental covariates in predicting species-specific local abundances. The eDNA-derived community proxies revealed ecological gradients complementary to visual census data, helping to distinguish sites dominated by coastal demersal fishes versus offshore predators, territorial reef fishes versus mobile dispersers and benthic versus pelagic species. Using joint Species Distribution Models (jSDMs), within the Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) framework, we compared the predictive performance of models based solely on socio-environmental covariates with those that additionally incorporated eDNA-based information. Including eDNA information significantly improved model fit for 16 out of 26 species, including the endangered dusky grouper (Epinephelus marginatus), and contributed to one-third of explained variance in species local abundances on average. Synthesis and applications. This study demonstrates that integrating eDNA metabarcoding data into species distribution models can improve fish abundance predictions, especially for site-attached and reef-associated species. This approach provides a scalable and cost-effective tool for monitoring, impact assessment, spatial planning and adaptive management of marine resources.Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the journal's .
Trait‐based ecology, a prominent research field identifying traits linked to the distribution and interactions of organisms and their impact on ecosystem functioning, has flourished in the last three decades. Yet, the field still grapples with critical challenges, broadly framed as Raunkiæran shortfalls. Recognizing and interconnecting these limitations is vital for designing and prioritizing research objectives and mainstreaming trait‐based approaches across a variety of organisms, trophic levels, and biomes. This strategic review scrutinizes eight major limitations within trait‐based ecology, spanning scales from organisms to the entire biosphere. Challenges range from defining and measuring traits (SF 1), exploring intraspecific variability within and across individuals and populations (SF 2), understanding the complex relationships between trait variation and fitness (SF 3), and discerning trait variations with underlying evolutionary patterns (SF 4). This review extends to community assembly (SF 5), ecosystem functioning and multitrophic relationships (SFs 6 and 7), and global repositories and scaling (SF 8). At the core of trait‐based ecology lies the ambition of scaling up processes from individuals to ecosystems by exploring the ecological strategies of organisms and connecting them to ecosystem functions across multiple trophic levels. Achieving this goal necessitates addressing key limitations embedded in the foundations of trait‐based ecology. After identifying key SFs, we propose pathways for advancing trait‐based ecology, fortifying its robustness, and unlocking its full potential to significantly contribute to ecological understanding and biodiversity conservation. This review underscores the significance of systematically evaluating the performance of organisms in standardized conditions, encompassing their responses to environmental variation and effects on ecosystems. This approach aims to bridge the gap between easily measurable traits, species ecological strategies, their demography, and their combined impacts on ecosystems.
Our understanding of the emergence of mountain floras rests on our ability to infer how orogeny, landscape dynamics and climate change altered their evolutionary trajectories. Here we reconstruct the assembly of the diverse sky-island flora of the European Alps and test the impact of key geo-climatic events. We use a dated 5,231-species phylogeny, including 96% of the sky-island flora. The assembly of this flora occurred through the colonization of over a thousand distinct lineages, of which 46% speciated from their lowland or non-Alpine ancestor and 6% underwent in situ cladogenesis. The young ages of extant sky-island lineages show that their accumulation was decoupled from ancient geo-climatic events but accelerated throughout the Plio-Pleistocene. The sky-island vegetation therefore assembled through recent lineage turnover, which was triggered, rather than impeded, by Pleistocene glacial intensification. This perspective challenges previous assumptions and highlights the complex interplay of geo-climatic factors in shaping the intricate tapestry of alpine floras.
