Knowing a species’ area requirements is fundamental for species conservation. For the nominate subspecies of the White-backed Woodpecker Dendrocopos leucotos , a species of high conservation concern in Europe, estimates of the seasonal and year-round area requirements based on telemetry are missing. In the present study, we radio-tracked adult White-backed Woodpeckers in Central Europe and investigated bi-monthly home-range si...

Mast seeding is the episodic, massive production of plant seeds synchronized over large areas. The resulting superabundance of seeds represents a resource pulse that can profoundly affect animal populations across trophic levels. Following years of high seed production, the abundance of both seed consumers and their predators increase. Higher predator abundance leads to increased predation pressure across the trophic web, impa...

Purpose of Review Wildfires, wind storms, and pest outbreaks are the main large-scale disturbances of temperate and boreal forests, which often generate large amounts of deadwood in the landscape. Salvage and sanitation loggings (hereafter salvage logging) are usually practiced following such disturbance events and the generated deadwood is then extracted from the forest. Those practices affect a broad array of species, includ...

Species are often arranged along a continuum from “specialists” to “generalists”. Specialists typically use fewer resources, occur in more patchily distributed habitats and have overall smaller population sizes than generalists. Accordingly, the specialist-generalist variation hypothesis (SGVH) proposes that populations of habitat specialists have lower genetic diversity and are genetically more differentiated due to reduced g...

Population divergence could be strongly affected by species’ ecology and might not be a direct response to climate‐driven environmental change. We tested this in the middle spotted woodpecker ( Dendrocoptes medius ) , a non‐migratory, low‐dispersal habitat specialist associated with old deciduous forests of the Western Palearctic. We present the first phylogeographic study of this species integrating genetic data (three mitoch...

We propose a quantitative zonation of Switzerland based on the distribution of breeding birds. We use a combined dataset from two nationwide bird censuses 20 years apart to account for distribution changes between the censuses. This approach approximates the ‘potential’ distribution of species more closely than a dataset from one period only. A numerical approach with correspondence analysis and non‐hierarchical clustering res...