Climate resilience of European wine regions.

Over centuries, European vintners have developed a profound knowledge about grapes, environment, and techniques that yield the most distinguishable wines. In many regions, this knowledge is reflected in the system of wine geographical indications (GI), but climate change is challenging this historical union. Here, we present a climate change vulnerability assessment of 1085 wine GIs across Europe and propose climate-resilient development pathways using an ensemble of biophysical and socioeconomic indicators.

Mapping the natural disturbance risk to protective forests across the European Alps.

Mountain forests play an essential role in protecting people and infrastructure from natural hazards. However, forests are currently experiencing an increasing rate of natural disturbances (including windthrows, bark beetle outbreaks and forest fires) that may jeopardize their capacity to provide this ecosystem service in the future. Here, we mapped the risk to forests' protective service across the European Alps by integrating the risk components of hazard (in this case, the probability of a disturbance occurring), exposure (the proportion of forests that protect people or infrastructure), and vulnerability (the probability that the forests lose their protective structure after a disturbance).

Regional food self-sufficiency potential in the European Alpine space.

The sustainability of the food system needs to be improved, including shortening supply chains and promoting the consumption of regional food. Here, we explore the current potential for regional food self-sufficiency in the European Alpine space by calculating the current regional food/feed energy balance, deriving the regional per capita land footprint based on current food/feed consumption rates, and modelling the current potential for regional food/feed self-sufficiency. We show that 59% of the 560 Pcal of energy currently available in the study area comes from domestic production, and almost 60% of the energy is used for livestock consumption, with high regional variability.

A detailed land use/land cover map for the European Alps macro region.

Spatially and thematically detailed land use maps are of special importance to study and manage populated mountain regions. Due to the complex terrain, high elevational gradients as well as differences in land demand, these regions are characterized by a high density of different land uses that form heterogeneous landscapes. Here, we present a new highly detailed land use/landcover map for the areas included in the European Strategy for the Alpine Region.

A biodiversity monitoring program for macroinvertebrates inhabiting streams and rivers of South Tyrol (Italy): aims, methodologies, and publicly accessible dataset.

Despite very limited in their extension - about 1% of the total surface of our planet - freshwater habitats greatly contribute to the biodiversity of Earth, since 10% of the known species and 33% of the vertebrates inhabit freshwaters. However, continuous monitoring of habitats and biodiversity - not only aquatic - is considered as a complex task due to the long-term perspective these monitoring programs should have, and the connected required financial needs. Here, within the framework of a regional-scale program of biodiversity monitoring started in the mountainous region of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen (Italy) - including terrestrial and aquatic habitats - we present a dataset covering the first year of the fieldwork campaign aiming at sampling and identifying the benthic macroinvertebrates inhabiting the running-waters of the region.

Integrating supply, flow and demand to enhance the understanding of interactions among multiple ecosystem services.

A comprehensive understanding of the relationships among ecosystem services (ES) is important for landscape management, decision-making and policy development, but interactions among multiple ES remain under-researched. In particular, earlier studies often did not clearly distinguish between supply, flow and demand. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms in complex socio-ecological systems remain less examined.