Identifying ecologically matching areas is both challenging and critical for understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity and advancing conservation planning. However, existing approaches often lack spatial flexibility, overlook shape and size constraints, or rely on limited environmental parameters, reducing their effectiveness in real‐world applications. To address these limitations, we developed and tested a four‐step fra...

Protected areas are essential for preserving forest ecosystems and maintaining their ecological integrity. Nonetheless, their role in conserving understory plant species in Italy remains understudied. We analysed 5,423 vegetation plots sampled in Italian broadleaved deciduous forests between 1980 and 2020. Using propensity score matching, we controlled for potential confounding factors such as elevation, climate, proximity to...

Aim Sacred natural sites (SNS) are culturally governed places that often retain remnants of natural vegetation, safeguard species of conservation concern and maintain landscape continuity, positioning them as potential Other Effective Area‐Based Conservation Measures (OECMs). Despite increasing ecological interest, national datasets remain unavailable, limiting reproducibility of studies and preventing systematic evaluation of...

The Natura 2000 (N2K) network of protected areas is one of the main tools for area‐based conservation in the European Union (EU), yet its role in preserving plant biodiversity requires better understanding. We examined data kept in the European Vegetation Archive from over 1.2 million vegetation plots and obtained over 14.2 million plant species occurrences. To test the N2K network's representativeness of plant species gamma d...

Aim Climate change poses a global threat to forest ecosystems. However, its effects are usually examined independently of local factors, assuming that functionally diverse forest habitat types within a single biome will react similarly. Here we evaluated how temperature influences the taxonomic and functional diversity of tree and shrub guilds, accounting for the regulatory effects of local factors across forest habitat types....

Biodiversity change forecasts rely on long‐term time series, but such data are often scarce in space and time. Here, we interpolated spatiotemporal changes in species richness using a new method based on machine learning that does not require temporal replication at sites. Using 698,692 one‐time sampled vegetation plots, we estimated trends in vascular plant alpha diversity across Europe and validated our approach against 22,8...

Aim Forests dominated by non‐native trees are becoming increasingly common. However, their impact on biodiversity remains uncertain, with a debate on whether they represent ‘green deserts’ or secondary habitats for biodiversity. We addressed this question by evaluating the patterns and ecological drivers of taxonomic and functional understory diversity between black pine ( Pinus nigra ) forests within and outside its native di...

Motivation The intrinsic characteristics of islands make them a unique study system for the investigation of ecological and evolutionary dynamics. The Mediterranean Basin, an island‐rich biodiversity hotspot, still lacks a comprehensive spatial database for these geographic features. This study presents the first comprehensive spatial database of all Mediterranean islands larger than 0.01 km 2 , aiding ecological investigation...

The Natura 2000 (N2K) protected area (PA) network is a crucial tool to limit biodiversity loss in Europe. Despite covering 18% of the European Union's (EU) land area, its effectiveness at conserving biodiversity across taxa and biogeographic regions remains uncertain. Testing this effectiveness is, however, difficult because it requires considering the nonrandom location of PAs, and many possible confounding factors. We used p...

Terrestrial ecosystems affect climate by reflecting solar irradiation, evaporative cooling, and carbon sequestration. Yet very little is known about how plant traits affect climate regulation processes (CRPs) in different habitat types. Here, we used linear and random forest models to relate the community‐weighted mean and variance values of 19 plant traits (summarized into eight trait axes) to the climate‐adjusted proportion...

Protecting global biodiversity is one of the most urgent tasks for the coming decades. Area-based conservation is a pillar for preserving ecosystems and species. Strictly protected areas specifically preserve biodiversity and ecosystem processes. The “EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030” targets strict protection for 10% of land area. Here we performed the first analysis of strictly protected areas (as IUCN type Ia, Ib, and II)...

We analysed the invasion history of two North American macrophytes ( Elodea canadensis and E. nuttallii ) in Italy, through an accurate census of all available herbarium and field records, dating between 1850 and 2019, and a rich literature collection describing the initial introduction and naturalisation phase that supports the results obtained by the occurrence records. Elodea canadensis arrived in Italy before 1866 and had...

Motivation Indicator values are numerical values used to characterize the ecological niches of species and to estimate their occurrence along gradients. Indicator values on climatic and edaphic niches of plant species have received considerable attention in ecological research, whereas data on the optimal positioning of species along disturbance gradients are less developed. Here, we present a new data set of disturbance indic...

The decline of freshwater flora due to alteration, reclamation and trophic perturbation of lowland wetlands is among the most relevant issues in biological conservation. The contribution of heavily modified water bodies (HMWBs) in preserving plant diversity is notable, but the underlying ecological mechanisms are not completely explored. To contribute to this debate and expand the knowledge on the role of HMWBs in maintaining...

Sacred natural sites (SNS) have gained recognition from conservationists, and are regarded as the oldest form of habitat protection in human history. Many case studies and literature reviews have been published on the subject. However, an updated and global-level synthesis on the effect of SNS on biodiversity conservation is still lacking. Here, we provide the first systematic review on SNS and biodiversity conservation, aimin...

Aims Aeolian islands form an active volcanic archipelago. By using updated vascular plant checklists for islands and islets, we tested four hypotheses: (i) Island species–area relationship (ISAR) of alien species has lower c ‐ and higher z ‐values than native species, (ii) islands with active volcanoes have lower species richness than expected for native and alien species, (iii) ISAR of native species shows lower c ‐ and highe...