Grassland ecosystems are among the most threatened biomes, and their restoration has become common in nature conservation. Yet restoration is rarely applied specifically for reptiles, which are among the most threatened vertebrates. The Meadow Viper ( Vipera ursinii ) has become extinct in most of lowland Europe, and an endangered subspecies ( Vipera ursinii rakosiensis ) has been a target of habitat restoration and captive br...

Aim We test the prediction that beta diversity (species turnover) and the decay of community similarity with distance depend on spatial resolution (grain). We also study whether patterns of beta diversity are related to variability in climate, land cover or geographic distance and how the independent effects of these variables depend on the spatial grain of the data. Location Europe, Great Britain, Finland and Catalonia. Metho...

Without robust and unbiased systems for monitoring, changes in natural systems will remain enigmatic for policy makers, leaving them without a clear idea of the consequences of any environmental policies they might adopt. Generally, biodiversity‐monitoring activities are not integrated or evaluated across any large geographic region. The EuMon project conducted the first large‐scale evaluation of monitoring practices in Europe...

One particular challenge in reducing the loss of biodiversity by 2010, as agreed on at the Earth Summit in 2002, is to assign conservation tasks to geographic or administrative entities (e.g., countries or regions) on different geographical scales. To identify conservation tasks, it is imperative to determine the importance of a specific area for the global survival of a species. So far, these national or subnational responsib...