Limited reciprocal surrogacy of bird and habitat diversity and inconsistencies in their representation in Romanian protected areas.

Because it is impossible to comprehensively characterize biodiversity at all levels of organization, conservation prioritization efforts need to rely on surrogates. As species distribution maps of relished groups as well as high-resolution remotely sensed data increasingly become available, both types of surrogates are commonly used. A good surrogate should represent as much of biodiversity as possible, but it often remains unclear to what extent this is the case.

Environmental differences explain subtle yet detectable genetic structure in a widespread pollinator.

Background: The environment is a strong driver of genetic structure in many natural populations, yet often neglected in population genetic studies. This may be a particular problem in vagile species, where subtle structure cannot be explained by limitations to dispersal. Consequently, these species might falsely be considered quasi-panmictic and hence potentially mismanaged.

Unraveling the habitat preferences of two closely related bumble bee species in Eastern Europe.

Co-occurrence of closely related species is often explained through resource partitioning, where key morphological or life-history traits evolve under strong divergent selection. In bumble bees (genus ), differences in tongue lengths, nest sites, and several life-history traits are the principal factors in resource partitioning. However, the buff-tailed and white-tailed bumble bee ( and respectively) are very similar in morphology and life history, but their ranges nevertheless partly overlap, raising the question how they are ecologically divergent.

Environmental selection is a main driver of divergence in house sparrows () in Romania and Bulgaria.

Both neutral and adaptive evolutionary processes can cause population divergence, but their relative contributions remain unclear. We investigated the roles of these processes in population divergence in house sparrows () from Romania and Bulgaria, regions characterized by high landscape heterogeneity compared to Western Europe. We asked whether morphological divergence, complemented with genetic data in this human commensal species, was best explained by environmental variation, geographic distance, or landscape resistance-the effort it takes for an individual to disperse from one location to the other-caused by either natural or anthropogenic barriers.