Research Projects

The European Topic Centre on Biodiversity and Ecosystems (ETC BE) is a consortium of 24 European research institutions, organizations and national agencies with expertise in terrestrial, aquatic and marine biodiversity and ecosystems. Coordinated by the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), the ETC-BE supports the European Environment Agency (EEA) in its mission to implement EU directives, strategies and policies and to provide information to policymakers and the public.

In particular, our team collaborates in the implementation of EU biodiversity legislations, their data flows and data reporting (e.g. Nature Directives, Invasive Alien Species, Nature Restoration Law, Natura 2000), as well as in the maintenance and further development of Information Systems (e.g. BISE).

Our group leads tasks related to:

• Status and trends of species and habitats under the Nature Directives
• Habitat types support, including EUNIS revision and maps
• Species support (harmonization and streamlining of scientific names)
• National Restoration Plans under the EU Nature Restoration Law
• Periodical reporting under the EU Nature Restoration Law
• Online catalogue of best practices in nature restoration
• Development of indicators to monitor the recovery of European ecosystems
• Support to the EU Regulation 1143/2014 on Invasive Alien Species (IAS)
• Protected areas dataflows and sufficiency assessments
• SEBI Biodiversity Indicators

And contributes to tasks on:

• Biodiversity Information System (BISE)
• Protected areas – scenarios for the expansion of the Trans-European Nature Network

Researchers from our lab involved in the project:

Henrique Pereira, project coordinator

Brigitte Braschler

Rafaella Canessa

Heather Cohen

Rowan Dunn-Capper

Miguel Fernandez

Néstor Fernandez

Jose Valdez

Other iDiv researchers involved:

Helge Bruehlheide

Ute Jandt

Duration: January 2023 to December 2026

Funding: ETC BE is funded by the European Environment Agency

info: https://www.eionet.europa.eu/etcs/etc-be

The European Union aims to reduce net carbon emissions by 55% in 2030 and become climate neutral by 2050. These goals can only be met if it boosts carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems, preferably while fostering socio-environmental co-benefits such as conserving biodiversity, adapting to climate change, and safeguarding socio-economic and cultural values. Both the IPCC and the IPBES have emphasized the great potential of ecosystem restoration and related nature-based solutions (NbS) for addressing the challenge.

wildE introduces ‘climate-smart rewilding’ as an innovative restoration approach to create climate benefits while also addressing other socio-environmental needs. This project will generate comprehensive case-comparative data on European rewilding trends and outcomes, while also quantify the net social, economic and environmental benefits, synergies, and trade-offs related to rewilding and alternative land use options. Finally, this project aims to develop cutting-edge projections for future land use and climate scenarios; and also, to develop tangible and readily accessible decision-support and management guidelines to enable policymakers, conservation managers, communities, and the private sector to co-construct climate-smart rewilding strategies as effective NbS for meeting the EU’s climate and biodiversity targets.

Project PI’s: Henrique Miguel Pereira & Néstor Fernández

Our researchers involved in the project:

• Magali Weissgerber is developing climate-smart quantitative indicators to characterize rewilding contexts and outcomes. Those indicators will be spatially resolved and possible to derive from modelled outputs. They will notably focus on ecosystem variables related to carbon cycling and on trophic complexity.
• Gavin S. Stark is responsible for the further development of a conceptual framework for climate-smart rewilding. In addition, he will examine the costs and benefits of ecosystem restoration using rewilding approaches, while developing biodiversity projections for rewilding under Nature Futures scenarios (NFF), using countryside species-area relationships (cSAR/SAR) and other models (e.g., species distribution models).

Duration of the Project: 1 January 2023 to 1 January 2027

Funding information:  The wildE project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programs under grant agreement No 101081251.

Website: www.wilde-project.eu/rewilding-baselines

The magnitude and dynamics of the global biodiversity crisis are hard to quantify and require rapid, reliable and repeatable biodiversity monitoring data which decision makers can use to evaluate policy options. Providing such information – from local to global levels and within timescales relevant to policy – calls for improved integration of data on biodiversity from different sources such as citizen scientists, museums, herbaria and researchers.

B-Cubed aims to address this challenge by transforming biodiversity monitoring into an agile and responsive process. The project works closely with existing biodiversity initiatives to identify and address policy needs. It leverages the concept of data cubes to standardise access to biodiversity data using the Essential Biodiversity Variables framework. These cubes are the basis for models and indicators of past, current and future biodiversity. The models will be accessible to users in real-time and on-demand in a cloud computing environment, delivering information on biodiversity status and change. To ensure its results can be reused, the project creates exemplar automated workflows for modelling using biodiversity data cubes and for the calculation of change indicators. The effectiveness of B-Cubed’s solutions is demonstrated in four case studies, varying in geographic extent, biodiversity richness and data availability.

The project PI(s)

Project coordinator: Dr Quentin Groom,  Meise Botanic Garden

Partners:

Meise Botanic Garden, The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, )The Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO), University of Bologna (UNIBO), Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (JLU), Ovidius University of Constanța (UOC), South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), Stellenbosch University (SU),Pensoft Publishers (PENSOFT), German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA), University of Aveiro (UAVR), La Trobe University (LTU).

Researchers from our lab involved in the project

Lina M. Estupinan-Suarez

Miguel Fernandez

Henrique Pereira

Duration of the project: From March 2023 to August 2026 (42 month)

Funding information: Funded by the European Union: B3 (Biodiversity Building Blocks for policy) receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme (ID No 101059592).

Project website: https://b-cubed.eu/

“Naturalness is the basis of effectiveness.” – Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Rewilding aims at the restoration of self-sustaining complex ecosystems and biodiversity while minimizing human interventions. Its main focus is the development and improvement of dispersal capacities, natural stochastic disturbances and trophic complexity within the ecosystem. Yet, evaluating the effects and progress of rewilding interventions is still a matter of discussion.

This PhD project is dedicated to evaluating the effects of passive rewilding, with a specific emphasis on trophic complexity. For this, a camera trap study is conducted in the Peneda-Gerês National park in Northern Portugal – an area that experienced agricultural abandonment and underwent great land-use changes within the past 60 years. The study was initiated in 2015 and since then 64 camera traps are consistently deployed every year in a 16 km² grid nearby Castro Laboreiro.

The primary aim is to analyze trends within this long-term monitoring period regarding occupancy and abundances of medium to large sized mammal species. Additionally, we strive to assess potential occurrences and population sizes by considering the ecological carrying capacity of the area. This involves analyzing food availability through estimating plant biomass. The gathered information is then utilized to model food webs and energy fluxes within the study area. In doing so, we hope to establish an indicator for how close the current population state is to a natural state without any human disturbances and develop guidelines for managers on how to improve future restoration actions.

All camera trap data generated by this project will be made publicly accessible through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This ensures that our findings contribute to the broader scientific community and support global biodiversity initiatives.

Zuleger A, Perino A, Wolf F, Wheeler H, Pereira H (2023). Long-term monitoring of mammal communities in the Peneda-Gerês National Park using camera trap data. Version 1.5. Biodiversity Data Journal. Sampling event dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/rah33j

Participants: Zuleger, Annika M.

Duration: 2021 – 2024

Funding: The project receives no specific funding.

The Peneda-Gerês National Park in Northern Portugal was created in 1971 with the aim to protect the soil, water, flora and fauna, while preserving its high value to human and natural resources. It is the only national park in Portugal and supports a great diversity of habitats, some of them classified as Special Areas of Conservation in the Habitats Directive. Within the boundaries of the park, approximately 235 vertebrate species were identified, of which 200 are threatened or under protection, e.g. the Iberian wolf (Canis lupus signatus) which was almost hunted to extinction during the last century.

Historically, agro-pastoral activities were widespread in the northern region of the park, but population declines and emigration over the past 60 years led to agricultural abandonment and the possibility of wildlife comeback through passive rewilding. Consequently, the area offers the opportunity of studying the effects of land abandonment and rewilding on ecosystems and communities.

Our working group monitors those land-use changes and the resulting effects on wildlife in an ongoing project since 2015. The long-term monitoring includes weather and climate data, vegetation and land-use data obtained from aerial images as well as information on animal populations from camera trap surveys. The goal is to make all data publicly available in a large database. This rich, long-term dataset can then be used in an array of monitoring and ecological studies.

Additionally, the area serves as an educational and research site for master’s students and several PhD projects, resulting in various conservational and ecological projects that also include other focus areas and taxa.

Participants: Zuleger, Annika M.; Jörger-Hickfang, Theresa; Pereira, Henrique M.

Duration: 2015 – on-going

Funding: The project receives no specific funding.

Halting and reversing biodiversity loss is the main goal of conservation biology and it is the main objective of Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Rewilding is an innovative and process-oriented approach that aims to strengthen the adaptive capacity of ecosystems by (re)establishing ecological processes to enhance biodiversity. Rewilding projects are gaining support as an approach that reconciles nature conservation and ecosystem restoration with society and economy. Although a few studies proposed indicators for the ecological assessment of rewilding, empirical evidences are still scarce. Monitoring changes in mammal community is a key indicator for measuring the effect of rewilding as they are an integral part of the trophic complexity due to their top-down effect and their dominant interactions on regulation and functioning of ecosystems. However, traditional monitoring methods for mammals, such as camera trapping could be tedious and expensive due to vandalism, logistics and monetary investment. We need more efficient, replicable and easy to implement tools to monitor the long-term biodiversity changes across time and space. Fortunately, upcoming innovative techniques, such as environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding, have proven to be a valuable tool for biodiversity assessment and are revolutionising how we monitor biodiversity. eDNA metabarcoding consists in the identification of multiple taxa via next-generation sequencing using DNA from water or soil samples. It holds an immense potential to monitor aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity at much larger scales and more effectively than other methodologies such as camera-trapping.

In this project, we aim to implement eDNA as a biodiversity monitoring tool in the only rewilding site in Germany, the Oder Delta, which is a unique region with a rich mosaic of terrestrial, marine and fresh water ecosystems and is the study site of the project “Rewilding-DE” led by UFZ, iDiv and MLU. Rewilding-DE aims to assess the trajectory of rewilding using among others, camera traps.

With eDNA we will detect mammal communities and compare them with the information gained by camera traps. We aim to assess the feasibility of using eDNA instead of camera trapping in the future. To do so, we are collecting water, soil and mosquitoes’ samples in the same places where the cameras are. We are amplifying 12S and 16S locus and preparing a library for next-generation sequencing for mammal species identification. To our knowledge, this will be the first project to use eDNA at a rewilding site and could set a precedent for an efficient methodology for monitoring biodiversity changes in the long-term.

PIs: Maria Mendez Camarena, Sandeep Sharma, Luis Daniel Prada Salcedo, Martin Schlegel, Henrique Pereira.

Duration: 01.02.2023 until 31.12.2023

Funding: Support of iDiv funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – FZT 118, 202548816