Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PROBAE (Protect butterflies across Europe through climate refugia)
Período documentado: 2022-08-01 hasta 2024-07-31
As Europe transitions to more sustainable societies, it is important to identify regions that will allow maximizing investments in area-based conservation actions. Such goals are expected as part of recent international commitments, including the EU Pollinators Initiative and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
PROBAE set the goal of developing a framework to identify areas of conservation priority for pollinator insects across Europe, focusing on butterflies and climate change refugia (i.e. areas of predicted low impact of climate change). The framework has been developed and applied to the butterflies of Italy (Riva et al. 2023, Global Change Biology 29 (7), 1715-1728). Ongoing work will expand the application of this framework to the European continent, evaluating butterfly population trends across Europe in relation to environmental gradients and climate change exposure.
No website has been developed for the project; however, a brief description of PROBAE and all papers published during the fellowship have been uploaded at https://federicoriva.github.io/riva_ecology. Future publications related to PROBAE will also be listed in this website.
Preliminary analyses conducted in Italy identified land use as an important determinant of the distribution of butterfly species even at scales of 50 by 50 km cells. This means that identifying climate change refugia without considering land use change will be at best inaccurate. Implementation of this framework across Europe will ensure the identification of proper conservation hotspots based on climate change refugia that account for land use patterns and forecasted change. The review we published on Complex System Science in ecology and conservation (Riva, Graco-Roza et al. 2023, Science Advances, in press) has outlined a series of philosophies and paradigms that will be explored as the European-scale trends in butterfly populations are assessed.
I have shared via social media the first output of PROBAE with success. Based on Altmetric (https://wiley.altmetric.com/details/141778947) Riva et al. 2023 (Global Change Biology 29 (7), 1715-1728) ranks in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. Our review of Complex System Science also has already received attention. I will participate at two conferences in Summer 2023 - Biology of Butterflies Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, and the International Congress for Conservation Biology, Kigali, Rwanda - to present the result of butterfly population trends across Europe and related drivers.
In terms of potential impacts, Riva et al. (2023, Global Change Biology 29 (7), 1715-1728) has been already discussed at national meetings in the context of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The European analysis of population trends is expected to provide important information for the application of area-based targets across the continent (e.g. 30 by 30 goal, where 30% of terrestrial areas are expected to be reserved to nature by 2030). The participation of the fellow to two international meeting - the Biology of Butterflies meeting (Prague, Czech Republic) and International Congress for Conservation Biology (Kigali, Rwanda) - will facilitate the dissemination of the fellowship results with stakeholders and policy makers, as well as academics.