Agricultural practices and biodiversity: Conservation policies for semi-natural grasslands in Europe.

Europe's semi-natural grasslands support notably high levels of temperate biodiversity across multiple taxonomic groups. However, these ecosystems face unique conservation challenges. Contemporary agricultural practices have replaced historical traditional low-intensity agriculture in many regions, resulting in a spectrum of management intensities within these ecosystems, ranging from highly intensive methods to complete abandonment.

Balancing disturbance risk and ecosystem service provisioning in Swiss mountain forests: an increasing challenge under climate change.

Unlabelled: Climate change severely affects mountain forests and their ecosystem services, e.g., by altering disturbance regimes.

Addressing disturbance risk to mountain forest ecosystem services.

Ecosystem service (ES) mapping has been developed with the aim of supporting ecosystem management, but ES maps often lack information about uncertainty and risk, which is essential for decision-making. In this paper, we use a risk-based approach to map ES in mountain forests, which are experiencing an increasing rate of natural disturbances, such as windthrow, bark beetle outbreaks, and forest fires. These disturbances affect the capacity of forests to provide essential ecosystem services, such as protection from natural hazards, wood production, and carbon sequestration, thus posing a challenge for forest management.

Increasing the broad-leaved tree fraction in European forests mitigates hot temperature extremes.

Forests influence climate through a myriad of chemical, physical and biological processes and are an essential lever in the efforts to counter climate change. The majority of studies investigating potential climate benefits from forests have focused on forest area changes, while changes to forest management, in particular those affecting species composition, have received much less attention. Using a statistical model based on remote sensing observations over Europe, we show that broad-leaved tree species locally reduce land surface temperatures in summer compared to needle-leaved species.

Biotic and abiotic drivers of tree seedling recruitment across an alpine treeline ecotone.

Treeline responses to climate change ultimately depend on successful seedling recruitment, which requires dispersal of viable seeds and establishment of individual propagules in novel environments. In this study, we evaluated the effects of several abiotic and biotic drivers of early tree seedling recruitment across an alpine treeline ecotone. In two consecutive years, we sowed seeds of low- and high-elevation provenances of Larix decidua (European larch) and Picea abies (Norway spruce) below, at, and above the current treeline into intact vegetation and into open microsites with artificially removed surface vegetation, as well as into plots protected from seed predators and herbivores.