Search results for "Nature reserve"
showing 10 items of 44 documents
Vegetation changes in boreo–nemoral forest stands depending on soil factors and past land use during an 80 year period of no human impact
2016
Information on the long-term changes in plant communities that occur without human interference is limited, due to insufficient studies where vegetation can be resurveyed. In 1912, a strict nature protection reserve, with non-intervention management, was established on Moricsala Island in Latvia, located in the boreo–nemoral forest zone. Prior to establishment of the nature reserve, part of the island area was used for agriculture. The island is now covered almost entirely by forest dominated by Quercus robur L. and Tilia cordata Mill. on sandy soils. Resurvey was conducted in 2011 in 17 plots in which tree layers and the understory vegetation had been described in 1930. The plots were cla…
Searching for a compromise between biological and economic demands to protect vulnerable habitats
2018
AbstractIdentifying vulnerable habitats is necessary to designing and prioritizing efficient marine protected areas (MPAs) to sustain the renewal of living marine resources. However, vulnerable habitats rarely become MPAs due to conflicting interests such as fishing. We propose a spatial framework to help researchers and managers determine optimal conservation areas in a multi-species fishery, while also considering the economic relevance these species may have in a given society, even in data poor situations. We first set different ecological criteria (i.e. species resilience, vulnerability and trophic level) to identify optimal areas for conservation and restoration efforts, which was bas…
Transcontinental 2200 km migration of a Nathusius’ pipistrelle (Pipistrellus nathusii) across Europe
2020
Abstract A male Pipistrellus nathusii ringed in Pape Natural Park (S Latvia) in August 2015 was recovered recently dead in Pitillas’ Lagoon Natural Reserve (N Spain) in March 2017. At 2224 km in SSW direction, this is the first documented bat migration between these countries and worldwide the longest migration record of a bat. We also report other observations of this species in autumn in Northern Spain, suggesting that the Iberian Peninsula may be an important wintering area for Nathusius’ pipistrelles. Conservation measures should be agreed on by countries along the migration routes to improve the protection of this species.
Marine reserves: size and age do matter
2008
Marine reserves are widely used throughout the world to prevent overfishing and conserve biodiversity, but uncertainties remain about their optimal design. The effects of marine reserves are heterogeneous. Despite theoretical findings, empirical studies have previously found no effect of size on the effectiveness of marine reserves in protecting commercial fish stocks. Using 58 datasets from 19 European marine reserves, we show that reserve size and age do matter: Increasing the size of the no-take zone increases the density of commercial fishes within the reserve compared with outside; whereas the size of the buffer zone has the opposite effect. Moreover, positive effects of marine reserve…
Habitat quality is more important than matrix quality for bird communities in protected areas
2018
Protected areas are meant to preserve native local communities within their boundaries, but they are not independent from their surroundings. Impoverished habitat quality in the matrix might influence the species composition within the protected areas through biotic homogenization. The aim of this study was to determine the impacts of matrix quality on species richness and trait composition of bird communities from the Finnish reserve area network and whether the communities are being subject of biotic homogenization due to the lowered quality of the landscape matrix. We used joint species distribution modeling to study how characteristics of the Finnish forest reserves and the quality of t…
The cost-effectiveness of using raptor nest sites to identify areas with high species richness of other taxa
2016
Abstract Given the limited resources available for conservation, it is important that the areas to preserve are selected in a cost effective manner. However, the cost effectiveness of the surrogate species strategy (the use of information on one or more species to identify areas of value for other species for which there is no, or more limited, available information) has seldom been evaluated. In this study, we investigate the opportunity cost of setting aside breeding sites of two forest raptor species (the surrogate species) by evaluating their individual and combined contribution to preserve diversity of polypores (wood-decaying fungi) and birds against the contributions of previously es…
The vegetation of a historic road system in the suburban area of Monte Pellegrino (Palermo, Sicily)
2020
Knowledge of the processes by which plants colonize old structures is a key element for nature-based design both in urban and suburban contexts. This paper analyses the natural vegetation on walls and in other microhabitats of the roadway structures of Monte Pellegrino (606 m a.s.l.) near Palermo (Sicily), built in the first half of the 1900s. The historical road has particular construction and architectural features, and its characteristics have been maintained to this day. The route, approximately 16 kilometers long, is well integrated within a site of high naturalistic value which has been designated as a Special Area of Conservation (ITA020014) of the Natura 2000 network, and it is also…
Italian marine reserve effectiveness: does enforcement matter?
2008
Marine protected areas (MPAs) have become popular tools worldwide for ecosystem conservation and fishery management. Fish assemblages can benefit from protection provided by MPAs, especially those that include fully no-take reserves. Fish response to protection can thus be used to evaluate the effectiveness of marine reserves. Most target fish are high-level predators and their overfishing may affect entire communities through trophic cascades. In the Mediterranean rocky sublittoral, marine reserves may allow fish predators of sea urchins to recover and thus whole communities to be restored from coralline barrens to macroalgae. Such direct and indirect reserve effects, however, are likely t…
Heritage and knowledge: apparatus, logic and strategies in the formation of heritage
2016
Heritage as a category reflects diverse political positions. All heritagisation processes imply the creation of hierarchies, selection, ranking, and categorization of what is worthy or unworthy of being heritage, and all heritage creation involves certain disciplinary processes that confer legitimacy. As a modern invention, heritage was built on two closely-related cornerstones: the distinction between nature and culture and the difference between normalized knowledge and marginal knowledge. As a result, refining processes were applied which became strategies to legitimise political domination. In this paper the constituent process of heritage creation and its links to normative knowledge a…
Cultural and socio-economic impacts of Mediterranean marine protected areas
2000
Marine protected areas (MPAs) may be important for protecting the marine environment, but they may also have substantial socio-cultural impacts about which very little is currently known, or acknowledged. In the Mediterranean, few data are available on the socio-economic consequences of MPAs. The present study reviews the existing data on MPAs in Spain, France, Italy and Greece. A general increase in tourist activities in Mediterranean MPAs is evident, as are increases in the abundances of larger fish species, although there are no data indicating yields for fisheries increase adjacent to MPAs. A large increase in the number of divers and vessels using MPAs has already had impacts on natura…