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

Abstract

Reliable estimates of long-term vegetation change are urgently needed as a benchmark for monitoring and reporting on the conservation status of terrestrial habitats, as well as to plan and undertake effective conservation measures. We introduce the EU-funded project VegTrends (“Assessing long-term trends in vegetation and evaluating protected areas effectiveness”) and illustrate results from its first work package. Building on an unprecedented number of previously-disconnected datasets now included in the ReSurveyEurope database, we assessed compositional shifts characterising the vegetation of European open habitats in the last decades. Besides quantifying community-level changes in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity metrics, we tracked trends in the occurrence and cover of individual species. We also identified the driving mechanisms (species gain vs loss) and tested for the exceptionality of observed changes. Our results suggest that, in the last decades, European open habitats underwent important changes in all the analysed diversity facets, with notable differences across vegetation types. At the community level, most habitats have experienced considerable shifts in both species composition and dominance structure, in most cases driven by species loss. Significant changes were also detected at the level of individual species. Although trends differed across vegetation types, our findings indicate an overall increase in generalist and competitive species at the expense of habitat specialists. While offering unprecedented insights into long-term vegetation dynamics at the European scale, our results highlight the importance of temporal analysis for an effective and targeted biodiversity conservation.