VegTrends - assessing long-term trends in European vegetation and evaluating protected areas effectiveness

Abstract

Many terrestrial habitats across the globe are currently assessed as “threatened”, and the extent to which existing protected areas effectively safeguard biodiversity is debated. With many ecosystem services depending on plants, reliable estimates of long-term vegetation change are needed as a benchmark for future monitoring and reporting, as well as to plan and undertake effective conservation measures. We hereby present VegTrends, a new EU-funded project aimed at i) providing a multi-habitat and multi-faceted assessment of temporal vegetation changes across plant communities and species; ii) evaluating the effectiveness of protected areas in conserving European habitats. Building on an unprecedented number of previously-disconnected datasets now included in the ReSurveyEurope database, VegTrends will allow producing the first comprehensive and representative report of temporal trends in the vegetation of European open habitats accounting for the effects of protection status (Natura2000 + Emerald Network). Besides assessing compositional shifts and quantifying changes in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity metrics, we will analyse trends in biological variables defining changes in conservation status (e.g. richness and cover of habitat specialist, threatened and alien species) and investigate whether they differ based on protection status. Moreover, we will identify driving mechanisms (turnover vs nestedness, gain vs loss) and test for the exceptionality of observed changes. This will allow pinpointing habitats and species that underwent the strongest changes, with important implications for habitat conservation.