Protected Areas are a main conservation tool to halt biodiversity loss. However, their performance has been often questioned and the need to improve their effectiveness is now more apparent than ever. Here, we propose Roadless Areas as a conservation target to increase the cover and effectiveness of Protected Areas. Roadless Areas represent natural and semi-natural areas of high conservation value that have no or little traffic and provide multiple ecosystem services. Here, we develop a methodological framework to identify Roadless Areas in Europe and assess their spatial properties and conservation status. We examine how the European Union’s conservation network, Natura 2000, would expand if Roadless Areas that are already partially included in Natura 2000 terrestrial sites or are adjacent to them would be added to the existing conservation network. We find that European lands are highly fragmented. Roadless Areas are unevenly distributed, and cover more than 30% of the European Union territory, with large Roadless Areas (≥100 km2) occupying about 18% of that surface. At the national level, there is a large variation in the percentage of overlap between Natura 2000 sites and Roadless Areas, with the Natura 2000 network currently encompassing between 19% and 89% of the Roadless Areas surface, depending on the member state. Our results demonstrate that Roadless Areas adjacent to Natura 2000 sites cover > 65% of the total Natura 2000 surface. As Roadless Areas have limited human access, we suggest integrating Roadless Areas into biodiversity conservation networks as a timely solution to minimize conflicts over expanding Protected Areas in the European Union and to achieve the goals of the European Union’s 2020 Biodiversity Strategy.

The delineation of Quiet Areas (QAs) forms nowadays a national obligation of EU countries. Nevertheless the variable applications of QAs among Member-States have highlighted the need for an international common approach for the preservation of Quietness. The objective of this paper is to identify and thus protect QAs of EU. Our methodological design consisted of the implementation of a coarse scale distance-based methodology regarding the identification of QAs among different countries, environmental and altitudinal zones with a view to investigating the spatial pattern of QAs as well as their spatial relation to other protected areas. QAs cover 56.09% of EU territory with most of the sites comprising an area larger than 100 km(2) indicating that Quietness provides a valuable ecosystem service for human well-being. Central Europe demonstrates lower percentages of Quietness whereas Mediterranean and Scandinavian areas contain higher percentages of Quietness. Also our findings regarding the spatial overlap of QAs with Natura 2000 network suggest that QAs actually indicate sites of environmental quality, and could thus be incorporated into environmental policy initiatives. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The implementation of the Ecosystem Service (ES) concept into practice might be a challenging task as it has to take into account previous “traditional” policies and approaches that have evaluated nature and biodiversity differently. Among them the Habitat (92/43/EC) and Bird Directives (79/409/EC), the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC), and the Noise Directive (2002/49/EC) have led to the evaluation/designation of areas in Europe with different criteria. In this study our goal was to understand how the ES capacity of an area is related to its designation and if areas with multiple designations have higher capacity in providing ES. We selected four catchments in Greece with a great variety of characteristics covering over 25% of the national territory. Inside the catchments we assessed the ES capacity (following the methodology of Burkhard et al. 2009) of areas designated as Natura 2000 sites, Quiet areas and Wetlands or Water bodies and found those areas that have multiple designations. Data were analyzed by GLM to reveal differences regarding the ES capacity among the different types of areas. We also investigated by PCA synergies and trade-offs among different kinds of ES and tested for correlations among landscape properties, such as elevation, aspect and slope and the ES potential. Our results show that areas with different types or multiple designations have a different capacity in providing ES. Areas of one designation type (Protected or Quiet Areas) had in general intermediate scores in most ES but scores were higher compared to areas with no designation, which displayed stronger capacity in provisioning services. Among Protected Areas and Quiet Areas the latter scored better in general. Areas that combined both designation types (Protected and Quiet Areas) showed the highest capacity in 13 out of 29 ES, that were mostly linked with natural and forest ecosystems. We found significant synergies among most regulating, supporting and cultural ES which in turn display trade-offs with provisioning services. The different ES are spatially related and display strong correlation with landscape properties, such as elevation and slope. We suggest that the designation status of an area can be used as an alternative tool for environmental policy, indicating the capacity for ES provision. Multiple designations of areas can be used as proxies for locating ES “hotspots”. This integration of “traditional” evaluation and designation and the “newer” ES concept forms a time- and cost-effective way to be adopted by stakeholders and policy-makers in order to start complying with new standards and demands for nature conservation and environmental management.

The wolf (Canis lupus) is used as a case study to rate Natura 2000 sites in Greece based on preferred wolf habitat characteristics and test whether the network is suitable for their conservation. Road density, agricultural area, site area, connectivity, food availability (i.e., presence of natural prey), and elevation in 237 sites are combined in a logistic regression model. The occurrence of the wolf's natural prey was the most prevalent factor determining wolf presence, followed by agricultural cover. Considering the current status of these features at N2K site level, most sites currently hosting wolves (85.7%) have good or excellent prospects for the long-term presence of the wolf. On the contrary, 11 sites which now have wolves are predicted to be ineffective in keeping them in the future due to the absence of wild ungulates and their high agricultural coverage. Four sites with no wolf presence currently have excellent prospects to host wolves in the future. Roadless sites are a priority for protection and retaining their current condition is strongly suggested. The proposed approach aims to detect gaps in protection for the wolf and identify priority sites in need of mitigation actions. It can also assist the assessment of conservation policies in Greece and elsewhere toward accomplishing set goals in protected areas. By focusing on wolf protection, we hope to increase agencies' attention to deal with conservation effectiveness, especially in cases like Greece, where a number of sites are insufficiently known and protected and management measures are not properly implemented.

The novel articulations between the state, markets and civil society arising from the shift to networked environmental governance highlight the importance of creating equal participation opportunities. Relevant questions from an environmental justice perspective are not only who participates, but also with whom, in what, why and how. In this paper, we explore public participation in biodiversity governance that has emerged after the initial designation of a Natura 2000 network in Finland, Greece, Poland and the UK by focusing on distributive and procedural justice. Our analysis, based on focus groups and document analysis, shows that new participatory arrangements have taken the modes of project-based, market, interest group and e-governance. These arrangements have been marked by problems in power and knowledge sharing, and in the distribution of conservation costs and benefits, reflecting serious deficits regarding environmental justice. Calls for public participation and wider stakeholder engagement in conservation across Europe should be followed by an acknowledgment of the diversity of perspectives, conflicting interests and social positions and their integration into biodiversity governance. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

The huge growth of population size along with all the accompanying impacts, like traffic flow, commercial and industrial activities have led to a respective increase of noise pollution in the urban environments. In most cases, noise pollution in big cities is characterized by low-frequency and continuous background sounds. This ever-growing environmental problem engages health risks and major complaints of annoyance on behalf of millions of citizens. Therefore, sustainable urban planning needs to seriously take into consideration the task of mitigating environmental noise. In addition, the quality of the acoustic environment plays an important role in urban as well as in rural and natural spaces, since it has been proven to affect biodiversity. In this paper, we demonstrate how efficiently assessing soundscape quality can be applied to real recordings from various sites. The evaluation of the qualitative attributes of the soundscape is carried out combining space-sound-human presence. The mapping of the extracted feature statistics to the perceived soundscape quality level is achieved through a Support Vector Machine Regression model. Extensive experiments have been carried out on a real-world dataset and the resulting performance evaluation proves that the proposed architecture can be applied to assess the soundscape quality of both natural and urban spaces.

Considering the wide growth of the wind turbine market over the last decade as well as their increasing power size, more and more potential conflicts have arisen in society due to the noise radiated by these plants. Our goal was to determine whether the annoyance caused by wind farms is related to aspects other than noise. To accomplish this, an auditory experiment on the recognition of wind turbine noise was conducted to people with long experience of wind turbine noise exposure and to people with no previous experience to this type of noise source. Our findings demonstrated that the trend of the auditory recognition is the same for the two examined groups, as far as the increase of the distance and the decrease of the values of sound equivalent levels and loudness are concerned. Significant differences between the two groups were observed as the distance increases. People with wind turbine noise experience showed a higher tendency to report false alarms than people without experience.

EU conservation policy is primarily based on the Natura 2000 network of protected areas (PAs). We analyzed the land-cover changes between 2000 and 2006 inside 25,703 Natura 2000 sites in 24 EU Member States, and compared them with those observed outside the PAs. At the EU level, ‘Artificial surfaces’ and ‘Agricultural areas’ exhibit lower rates of transformation within PAs than outside. ‘Forests and semi-natural areas’ marginally increased inside PAs, while they marginally decreased outside. In States that joined the EU before 2000, landscape transformation rates were low, and inside PAs ‘Forest’ preservation was accompanied with a shift from intensive agricultural practices ‘Permanent arable land’ to more diverse ‘Agricultural mosaics’. In new Member States (most of them located in Eastern Europe), there was agricultural abandonment, with conversion to ‘Artificial surfaces’ or ‘Natural vegetation’, both within and outside PAs. Broad scale EU policies (like the Common Agricultural Policy) and socio-economic drivers (like the transition from planned to market economy) seem to be dominant factors in explaining land-cover transformations, while conservation policies may moderate these trends inside PAs.

A number of phylogeographic studies have revealed the existence of multiple ice age refugia within the Balkan Peninsula, marking it as a biodiversity hotspot. Greece has been reported to harbor genetically differentiated lineages from the rest of Balkans for a number of mammal species. We therefore searched for distinct red deer lineages in Greece, by analyzing 78 samples originating from its last population in Parnitha Mountain (Central Greece). Additionally, we tested the impact of human-induced practices on this population. The presence of 2 discrete mtDNA lineages was inferred: 1) an abundant one not previously sampled in the Balkans and 2) a more restricted one shared with other Balkan populations, possibly the result of successful translocations of Eastern European individuals. Microsatellite-based analyses of 14 loci strongly support the existence of 2 subpopulations with relative frequencies similar to mitochondrial analyses. This study stresses the biogeographic importance of Central Greece as a separate Last Glacial Maximum period refugium within the Balkans. It also delineates the possible effects that recent translocations of red deer populations had on the genetic structuring within Parnitha. We suggest that the Greek red deer population of Parnitha is genetically distinct, and restocking programs should take this genetic evidence into consideration.

The present study attempts an evaluation of the first co-management framework that has been adopted and implemented in Greece over the last 10 years for the management of its protected areas. To get insight as to how efficient it has been, we evaluate the performance and outcomes of the 28 management authorities of the protected areas of the country that substantiate it and the conditions under which they have been operating. The study involved a large part of the Greek conservation community. It was conducted via a questionnaire dealing with issues of financing and administration, environmental management and guarding, and connection with the local community. For co-management, it is essential that the actors involved undertake their share of responsibility, which should be clearly defined and delimited; this was not usually the case. Decentralization of the power of management requires capacity building locally and active involvement of the local community; these have been addressed and achieved only to a limited degree. Most importantly, the support and commitment to conservation of state actors were often missing. Funding discontinuities, delays in responding to needs associated with biodiversity monitoring and protection and inefficient guarding were the major problems resulting from the inadequacies detected. Despite its weaknesses, the co-management framework contributed considerably to the conservation of environmental values of Greece. We propose improvements and measures that can substantially increase its overall effectiveness towards nature conservation. However, under the severe crisis that the country has been facing, its future is currently unknown.

The role of nature in tourism is widely acknowledged; yet, information remains limited about the determinants of green tourism development within conservation areas. Here, we aimed to provide a framework for exploring the supportive role of quietness in green tourism development. Because natural quietness is expected to facilitate conservation and promote environment-friendly tourism, we tested whether quiet areas within conservation sites in Greece indicate “hotspots” of green tourism. We found that the percentage of quietness was related to environment-friendly tourism, indicating that the acoustic value of a site contributes towards driving the pattern of green tourism. When more than 30% of the surface area of a conservation site was quiet, activities supporting green tourism were significantly higher. This threshold implies that both the conservation and acoustic value of a site are important in environment-conscious tourism destinations. Overall, we suggest that the acoustic quality of a site might function as a tool for management, facilitating the identification of green tourism “hotspots”.

Recent anthropogenic climate change is strongly associated with average shifts toward earlier seasonal timing of activity (phenology) in temperate-zone species. Shifts in phenology have the potential to alter ecological interactions, to the detriment of one or more interacting species. Recent models predict that detrimental phenological mismatch may increasingly occur between plants and their pollinators. One way to test this prediction is to examine data from ecological communities that experience large annual weather fluctuations. Taking this approach, we analyzed interactions over a four-year period among 132 plant species and 665 pollinating insect species within a Mediterranean community. For each plant species we recorded onset and duration of flowering and number of pollinator species. Flowering onset varied among years, and a year of earlier flowering of a species tended to be a year of fewer species pollinating its flowers. This relationship was attributable principally to early-flowering species, suggesting that shifts toward earlier phenology driven by climate change may reduce pollination services due to phenological mismatch. Earlier flowering onset of a species also was associated with prolonged flowering duration, but it is not certain that this will counterbalance any negative effects of lower pollinator species richness on plant reproductive success. Among plants with different life histories, annuals were more severely affected by flowering–pollinator mismatches than perennials. Specialized plant species (those attracting a smaller number of pollinator species) did not experience disproportionate interannual fluctuations in phenology. Thus they do not appear to be faced with disproportionate fluctuations in pollinator species richness, contrary to the expectation that specialists are at greatest risk of losing mutualistic interactions because of climate change.

•We assess the importance of patches of different quality in bear's movement pattern.•Habitat suitability and graph based movement models were combined.•Less suitable patches are critical for facilitating movement and connectivity.•Studies on movement should consider the importance of the intervening matrix.•Unexpected conservation priorities could be raised by combining different models.

In this paper, we investigate how processes of rescaling biodiversity governance downwards, upwards and outwards are interlinked with the increased global and European trends toward the neoliberalization of nature conservation. We furthermore explore who wins and who loses from this interrelationship. We focus on the European Union and specifically on England, Finland, Greece, and Poland, and we pay particular attention to the effects of the ongoing economic crisis. We draw on Marxist-influenced political ecology and geography literatures and use primary empirical data obtained through focus groups and interviews as well as analysis of legal and policy documents. Our analysis shows that EU states have mobilized a range of political strategies intended to expand and intensify the alignment of conservation with capitalist interests within a distinctively neoliberal framework. However, the variation in governmental strategies in the case study countries reveals that variegated neoliberalizations are intertwined with variegated rescaling processes. Thus despite the increasing homogenization of conservation, the historical evolution of governance forms and their legacy as well as differing socioeconomic and political contexts play a pivotal role in current dynamics. We argue that unraveling the different roles of the rescaling of biodiversity governance is crucial in exposing the contradictions inherent in the relationship between conservation and capitalism and in showing that the consensus-driven neoliberal rhetoric is increasingly lapsing into authoritarian governance in the era of one of the most severe capitalist crises.

The species-area relationship (SAR) is one of the few generalizations in ecology. However, many different relationships are denoted as SARs. Here, we empirically evaluated the differences between SARs derived from nested-contiguous and non-contiguous sampling designs, using plants, birds and butterflies datasets from Great Britain, Greece, Massachusetts, New York and San Diego. The shape of SAR depends on the sampling scheme, but there is little empirical documentation on the magnitude of the deviation between different types of SARs and the factors affecting it. We implemented a strictly nested sampling design to construct nested-contiguous SAR (SA(C)R), and systematic nested but non-contiguous, and random designs to construct non-contiguous species richness curves (SA(S)Rs for systematic and SACS for random designs) per dataset. The SA(C)R lay below any SA(S)R and most of the SACs. The deviation between them was related to the exponent f of the power law relationship between sampled area and extent. The lower the exponent f, the higher was the deviation between the curves. We linked SA(C)R to SA(S)R and SAC through the concept of "effective" area (A(e)), i.e. the nested-contiguous area containing equal number of species with the accumulated sampled area (A(S)) of a non-contiguous sampling. The relationship between effective and sampled area was modeled as log(A(e)) = klog(A(S)). A Generalized Linear Model was used to estimate the values of k from sampling design and dataset properties. The parameter k increased with the average distance between samples and with beta diversity, while k decreased with f. For both systematic and random sampling, the model performed well in predicting effective area in both the training set and in the test set which was totally independent from the training one. Through effective area, we can link different types of species richness curves based on sampling design properties, sampling effort, spatial scale and beta diversity patterns. (C) 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Although the number and extent of protected areas (PAs) are continuously increasing, their coverage of global biodiversity, as well as criteria and targets that underline their selection, warrants scrutiny. As a case study, we use a global dataset of sea turtle nesting sites (n = 2991) to determine the extent to which the existing global PA network encompasses nesting habitats (beaches) that are vital for the persistence of the seven sea turtle species. The majority of nesting sites (87%) are in the tropics, and are mainly hosted by developing countries. Developing countries contain 82% nesting sites, which provide lower protection coverage compared to developed countries. PAs encompass 25% of all nesting sites, of which 78% are in marine PAs. At present, most nesting sites in PAs with IUCN ratification receive high protection. We identified the countries that provide the highest and lowest nesting site protection coverage, and detected gaps in species-level protection effort within countries. No clear trend in protection coverage was found in relation to gross domestic product, the Global Peace Index or sea turtle regional management units; however, countries in crisis (civil unrest, war or natural catastrophes) provided slightly higher protection coverage of all countries. We conclude that global sea turtle resilience against threats spanning temperate to tropical regions require representative PA coverage at the species level within countries. This work is anticipated to function as a first step towards identifying specific countries or regions that should receive higher conservation interest by national and international bodies. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.