A predictive flight-altitude model for avoiding future conflicts between an emblematic raptor and wind energy development in the Swiss Alps.

Deployment of wind energy is proposed as a mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, wind energy and large birds, notably soaring raptors, both depend on suitable wind conditions. Conflicts in airspace use may thus arise due to the risks of collisions of birds with the blades of wind turbines.

: An R package to tune and evaluate species distribution models.

Balancing model complexity is a key challenge of modern computational ecology, particularly so since the spread of machine learning algorithms. Species distribution models are often implemented using a wide variety of machine learning algorithms that can be fine-tuned to achieve the best model prediction while avoiding overfitting. We have released , a new R package that aims to facilitate training, tuning, and evaluation of species distribution models in a unified framework.

What do tree-related microhabitats tell us about the abundance of forest-dwelling bats, birds, and insects?

Retaining trees during harvesting to conserve biodiversity is becoming increasingly common in forestry. To assess, select and monitor these habitat trees, ecologists and practitioners often use Tree-related Microhabitats (TreMs), which are assumed to represent the abundance and diversity of environmental resources for a wide range of forest-dwelling taxa. However, the relationship between TreMs and forest organisms is not fully understood.

Evaluating the effectiveness of retention forestry to enhance biodiversity in production forests of Central Europe using an interdisciplinary, multi-scale approach.

Retention forestry, which retains a portion of the original stand at the time of harvesting to maintain continuity of structural and compositional diversity, has been originally developed to mitigate the impacts of clear-cutting. Retention of habitat trees and deadwood has since become common practice also in continuous-cover forests of Central Europe. While the use of retention in these forests is plausible, the evidence base for its application is lacking, trade-offs have not been quantified, it is not clear what support it receives from forest owners and other stakeholders and how it is best integrated into forest management practices.

Species interactions and climate change: How the disruption of species co-occurrence will impact on an avian forest guild.

Interspecific interactions are crucial in determining species occurrence and community assembly. Understanding these interactions is thus essential for correctly predicting species' responses to climate change. We focussed on an avian forest guild of four hole-nesting species with differing sensitivities to climate that show a range of well-understood reciprocal interactions, including facilitation, competition and predation.

Mitigating the negative impacts of tall wind turbines on bats: Vertical activity profiles and relationships to wind speed.

Wind turbines represent a source of hazard for bats, especially through collision with rotor blades. With increasing technical development, tall turbines (rotor-swept zone 50-150 m above ground level) are becoming widespread, yet we lack quantitative information about species active at these heights, which impedes proposing targeted mitigation recommendations for bat-friendly turbine operation. We investigated vertical activity profiles of a bat assemblage, and their relationships to wind speed, within a major valley of the European Alps where tall wind turbines are being deployed.

Human recreation affects spatio-temporal habitat use patterns in red deer (Cervus elaphus).

The rapid spread and diversification of outdoor recreation can impact on wildlife in various ways, often leading to the avoidance of disturbed habitats. To mitigate human-wildlife conflicts, spatial zonation schemes can be implemented to separate human activities from key wildlife habitats, e.g.

Where to Combat Shrub Encroachment in Alpine Timberline Ecosystems: Combining Remotely-Sensed Vegetation Information with Species Habitat Modelling.

In many cultural landscapes, the abandonment of traditional grazing leads to encroachment of pastures by woody plants, which reduces habitat heterogeneity and impacts biodiversity typical of semi-open habitats. We developed a framework of mutually interacting spatial models to locate areas where shrub encroachment in Alpine treeline ecosystems deteriorates vulnerable species' habitat, using black grouse Tetrao tetrix (L.) in the Swiss Alps as a study model.

Temperate mountain forest biodiversity under climate change: compensating negative effects by increasing structural complexity.

Species adapted to cold-climatic mountain environments are expected to face a high risk of range contractions, if not local extinctions under climate change. Yet, the populations of many endothermic species may not be primarily affected by physiological constraints, but indirectly by climate-induced changes of habitat characteristics. In mountain forests, where vertebrate species largely depend on vegetation composition and structure, deteriorating habitat suitability may thus be mitigated or even compensated by habitat management aiming at compositional and structural enhancement.

Spatially explicit modeling of conflict zones between wildlife and snow sports: prioritizing areas for winter refuges.

Outdoor winter recreation exerts an increasing pressure upon mountain ecosystems, with unpredictable, free-ranging activities (e.g., ski mountaineering, snowboarding, and snowshoeing) representing a major source of stress for wildlife.

Modelling functional landscape connectivity from genetic population structure: a new spatially explicit approach.

Functional connectivity between spatially disjoint habitat patches is a key factor for the persistence of species in fragmented landscapes. Modelling landscape connectivity to identify potential dispersal corridors requires information about those landscape features affecting dispersal. Here we present a new approach using spatial and genetic data of a highly fragmented population of capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) in the Black Forest, Germany, to investigate effects of landscape structure on gene flow and to parameterize a spatially explicit corridor model for conservation purposes.