Knowledge of species distributions is essential for informing policies on nature conservation and restoration. However, updating them on a regular basis and doing so in a harmonized manner at the international level is difficult. The European Bird Census Council integrated national monitoring data covering 5 years to update farmland bird distributions and assessed how they changed. We used these data on 50 farmland bird specie...

The United Nations and European Union have set ambitious conservation goals to halt and reverse declines in biodiversity by protecting 30% of land and sea areas by 2030. Effective conservation planning requires evidence‐based spatial prioritization to maximize the coverage of species within designated protected areas. Based on a pan‐European database for occurrence and abundance of breeding birds collected in the 2010s, we app...

Aim Spatial autocorrelation (SAC), also known as aggregation or clumping, reflects species niche and dispersal, has conservation significance, and affects ecological models. Yet, we know little about the spatial and temporal patterns of SAC in empirical data. Here, we quantify the magnitude, spatial scaling, and temporal change of SAC in both species distributions and richness across multiple regions. Location Czechia, Europe,...

Aim Climate change is driving species towards higher elevations. While local shifts in elevation are well documented, patterns across entire mountain regions are less understood. On a local scale, abiotic factors, such as topography and solar radiation relating to microclimate, affect species distributions and can thus influence the rate of elevational shifts on mountain slopes. The impact of abiotic factors on biodiversity is...

Climate change is a major global threat to biodiversity with widespread impacts on ecological communities. Evidence for beneficial impacts on populations is perceived to be stronger and more plentiful than that for negative impacts, but few studies have investigated this apparent disparity, or how ecological factors affect population responses to climatic change. We examined the strength of the relationship between species-spe...

Mountain areas often hold special species communities, and they are high on the list of conservation concern. Global warming and changes in human land use, such as grazing pressure and afforestation, have been suggested to be major threats for biodiversity in the mountain areas, affecting species abundance and causing distribution shifts towards mountaintops. Population shifts towards poles and mountaintops have been documente...

Aim Two main mechanisms may explain post‐disturbance species colonization patterns of early successional habitats such as those originated by wildfires. First, post‐disturbance colonization is not limited by the dispersal ability of the species to reach the newly created open areas and, secondly, colonization is limited by dispersal. Under the first hypothesis, we expect, at a regional scale, to find similar post‐disturbance c...

Aim We developed a model enabling us to evaluate the contribution of both natural and human‐related factors to butterfly species richness in Catalonia, a Mediterranean area that harbours one of the most diverse butterfly faunas in Europe. Location The study was carried out in Catalonia (north‐east Iberian Peninsula), a region of 31,930 km 2 lying between the Pyrenees, the Ebro depression and the Mediterranean sea. Methods Data...