Introducing VegTrends - an EU-funded project to assess long-term trends in European vegetation and evaluating the effectiveness of protected areas

Abstract

Halting biodiversity loss, ensuring current and future provisioning of ecosystem services, and protecting natural habitats are core priorities of worldwide conservation agendas. Yet, across most of the globe, ecosystems are experiencing degradation and fragmentation, many terrestrial habitats are currently assessed as “threatened”, and the extent to which existing protected areas effectively safeguard biodiversity is debated. Quantitative assessments of biodiversity change are essential to achieve conservation goals. In particular, as many ecosystem services depend 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 assessment of temporal changes in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity of vegetation across biological scales (community and species); ii) evaluating the effectiveness of protected areas (Natura2000 + Emerald Network) in conserving European habitats. Building on an unprecedented amount 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. Specific research questions and the state of the art of the project will be presented, and preliminary insights related to the first aim will be discussed.