Elena D. Concepción

The National Museum of Natural Sciences · Biogeography and Global Change Department

Agricultural intensification is a major cause for biodiversity loss. It occurs at field scales through increased inputs and outputs, and at landscape scales through landscape simplification. Agri-environment schemes (AES) of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) aim at reducing biodiversity loss by promoting extensification of agricultural...

Summary 1. Ecological theory predicts that the effectiveness of local agri-environmental management to enhance species richness at field scales will be the highest at intermediate levels of landscape complexity because of nonlinear effects of landscape context on field-scale diversity. 2. We examined how landscape complexity determined effectiven...

Urbanisation has an important impact on biodiversity, mostly driving changes in species assemblages, through the replacement of specialist with generalist species, thus leading to biotic homogenisation. Mobility is also assumed to greatly affect species’ ability to cope in urban environments. Moreover, specialisation, mobility and their interaction...

Human-driven environmental changes can induce marked shifts in the functional structure of biological communities with possible repercussion on important ecosystem functions and services. At the same time it remains unclear to which extent these changes may differently affect various types of organisms. We investigated species richness and communit...

Urban growth seriously threatens biodiversity worldwide. We present the results of an exhaustive analysis of the impacts of urban sprawl on biodiversity along a broad urbanization gradient in Central Switzerland that suffers a strong growth of urban areas. We investigated the relative contributions of distinct components of urban sprawl (e.g., urba...

In response to the growing global recognition of the need to achieve sustainable development, significant efforts are underway to actively integrate nature into the urban environment by implementing green infrastructure. However, due to rapid urban growth, there is a need for novel approaches that integrate ecological knowledge and methods into urb...

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) envisions a world living in harmony with nature by 2050, with 23 intermediate targets to be achieved by 2030. However, aligning international policy and local implementation of effective actions can be challenging. Using steppe birds, one of the most threatened vertebrate groups in Europe,...

Presentamos el ejemplo de colaboración para la difusión del conocimiento científico entre el equipo de investigación del proyecto COMFOR-SUDOE y el equipo de comunicación y cultura científica del MNCN. El objetivo general de COMFOR-SUDOE es promover los bosques complejos y las plantaciones mixtas como estrategia resiliente frente al cambio climátic...

Context Counter-urbanization, or the reverse migration from the city to the countryside, is a well-known demographic trend associated with rural restructuring since the 1980s. Counter-urbanization is particularly relevant in social-ecological systems with a long history of human land use, such as the Mediterranean ones. However, the extent and impa...

European green agricultural policies have been relaxed to allow cultivation of fallow land to produce animal feed and meet shortfalls in exports from Ukraine and Russia. However, conversion of semi-natural habitats will disproportionately impact long term biodiversity and food security. In their Comment in @CommsEarth, Manuel Morales and colleagues...

The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has not halted farmland biodiversity loss. The CAP post‐2023 has a new ‘‘Green Architecture,’’ including the new ‘‘Eco‐scheme’’ instrument. How can this new Green Architecture help tackle the biodiversity crisis? Through 13 workshops and an online survey, over 300 experts from 23 European Member...

Conservation of Europe's biodiversity increasingly depends on funds invested within Natura 2000 farmland. Performance of these investments is estimated by the official Farmland Bird Index indicator, that merges species-specific trends for farmland species estimated with the standard TRIM method. We here reanalyze the long-term datasets used to calc...

El crecimiento urbano amenaza seriamente la biodiversidad a nivel mundial. Presento una revisión exhaustiva de los impactos de la expansión urbana descontrolada sobre la biodiversidad. Me centro en las contribuciones relativas de los componentes de la expansión urbana (i.e., área urbana, dispersión e intensidad de uso) a estos impactos para diferen...

We human beings are becoming urban citizens. More and more people spend their lives in urban environments, so that the conservation and improvement of urban biodiversity is an increasingly hot topic. On the one hand, as cities grow bigger and more populated they can become more hostile for some birds, but cities can also be safer than the surroundi...

Monocultures or single-tree species plantations cover a vast territory in southwest Europe (Spain, Portugal and south France). Much of these forests were planted either to prevent soil losses or to obtain provisioning ecosystem services. However, in some cases poor tree performance and lack of proper management has derived to high biotic and abioti...

The European Union (EU) has made great efforts to support the conservation of biodiversity over the last decades, especially with the creation of the Natura 2000 Network, a net of both terrestrial and marine protected areas, created on the basis of the Habitats and Birds Directives to safeguard the species and habitats of conservation concern in th...

Agri-environment schemes (AES) are a major conservation tool for protecting declining farmland birds in Europe. Most studies evaluate AES effectiveness on taxonomic diversity but there is a knowledge gap about how AES affect functional responses. We evaluate the effects of different AES on taxonomic and functional responses of open-land and overall...

The next reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the period 2021- 2027 (currently extended to 2023-2030) requires the approval by the European Commission of a Strategic Plan with environmental objectives for each Member State. Here we use the best available scientific evidence on the relationships between agricultural practices and bi...

Review on the scientific basis for the management of bird diversity in cities

Agri-environmental schemes (AES) of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) aims at reversing the negative effects of agricultural intensification on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Landscape context may modulate, and even constraint, AES effectiveness. We evaluate AES effectiveness on ant abundance, diversity and community composition. Ants are...

Las personas vivimos cada vez más en ambientes urbanos. Por ello, la importancia de la conservación y mejora de la biodiversidad urbana aumenta a medida que las ciudades son mayores y puede que más hostiles. Los factores que afectan a la salud de las personas, como es el caso de la contaminación del aire, puede que también disminuyan la biodiversid...

Urban growth is a major threat to biodiversity conservation at the global scale. Its impacts are expected to be especially detrimental when it sprawls into the landscape and reaches sites of high conservation value due to the species and ecosystems they host, such as protected areas. I analyzed the degree of urbanization (i.e., urban cover and grow...

The European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) still fails to address the environmental and socioeconomic challenges of EU’s agriculture. Agricultural ecosystems are further degrading, biodiversity is declining and agricultural Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions remain high. At the same time, farms are facing unresolved socio-economic chall...

Agricultural intensification continues to threaten habitat and biological diversity in farmland. In Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has established several measures to support biodiversity-fostering elements such as landscape features, semi-natural habitats and extensive land uses, together referred to as Green and Blue Infrastructure...

Enhancing “Greening” of the Common Agricultural Policy for biodiversity conservation in a collaborative way: The case of Spanish dry-cereal croplands. Elena D. Concepción, Yanka Kazakova, Vyara Stefanova, Katrina Marsden and Mario Díaz In agricultural landscapes, Green and Blue Infrastructure (GBI) comprises landscape elements that are essential...

Agricultural intensification continues being a major threat for biodiversity worldwide. Despite the incorporation of diverse conservation tools in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since the 1990s, European agriculture continues intensifying. The last CAP reform introduced compulsory greening, including measures to support semi-natural habitats...

We present a new comprehensive index for mapping the relative conservation value of threatened biodiversity. The index is based on explicit criteria to (1) select threatened species according to regional government responsibility for species' conservation; (2) combine species' presence by means of weighting factors based on differences in threat st...

Urban growth is considered one major component of land use change that seriously threatens ecosystem and biodiversity conservation worldwide. Urbanization is known to drive important changes in habitats and species assemblages that result in biotic homogenization. As human demand of land for settlements and infrastructures continues increasing, urb...

Agri-environment schemes (AES) and greening of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are crucial tools for biodiversity conservation in Europe. However, they have not been associated formally to any performance monitoring program that supports their actual benefits for biodiversity, and their effectiveness is recurrently questioned. We present an ex...

Managing agricultural landscapes to support biodiversity and ecosystem services is a key aim of a sustainable agriculture. However, how the spatial arrangement of crop fields and other habitats in landscapes impacts arthropods and their functions is poorly known. Synthesising data from 49 studies (1515 landscapes) across Europe, we examined effects...

Abstract: Agricultural intensification has driven the elimination of seminatural habitats and landscape elements, such as stream and field margins, hedgerows, grasslands or woodlands, which are now called green and blue infrastructure (GBI). GBI is crucial for ensuring ecological connectivity and biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes...

Abstract National accounting either ignores or fails to give due values to the ecosystem services, products, incomes and environmental assets of a country. To overcome these shortcomings, we apply spatially-explicit extended accounts that incorporate a novel environmental income indicator, which we test in the forests of Andalusia (Spain). Extende...

National accounting either ignores or fails to give due values to a country ́s ecosystem services, products, total income and environmental asset variations. To overcome these shortcomings, wedevelop a spatially-explicit extended ecosystem accounting framework, which we test intheMediterranean forests of Andalusia (Spain). This framework goes beyon...

The EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has tried to counteract negative impacts of intensive agriculture on biodiversity and associated ecosystem services mostly by means of voluntary agri-environment schemes (AES). More recently, direct payments to farmers have been linked to the application of greening measures derived from previous AES experien...

Urban growth is a major factor of global environmental change and has important impacts on biodiversity, such as changes in species composition and biotic homogenization. Most previous studies have focused on effects of urban area as a general measure of urbanization, and on few or single taxa. Here, we analyzed the impacts of the different compone...

1. Summary of significant effects of urban sprawl on species richness of different species ecological groups independent from non-urban predictors. Sign (+/-) and size (≥ 15%, 20% or 25% of deviance explained by urban variables) of effects are indicated. Figure 3. Significant responses of species richness of neophytes (a) to built-up area and (b) t...

Terrestrial ecosystems, such as forestlands and grasslands, provide many ecosystems services, and in most cases these services are provided by working landscapes that also generates relevant manufactured products (Haines-Young and Potschin, 2013). Conventional national accounts for agriculture and forestry activities neglect nonmarket environmental...

Las medidas agroambientales son la principal herramienta disponible para frenar la pérdida de biodiversidad en Europa a la vez que se mantiene la actividad agropecuaria. Sin embargo, no siempre son efectivas, en buena parte porque el entorno de los campos de cultivo puede llegar a ser demasiado hostil como para que las acciones a escala de campo te...

Las medidas agroambientales se consideran la principal herramienta disponible para frenar la pérdida de biodiversidad asociada a la intensificación de la agricultura. Sin embargo la cuestión sobre si constituyen o no una herramienta adecuada para cumplir este objetivo continúa siendo objeto de debate científico. Las evaluaciones realizadas hasta el...

Farmland biodiversity is affected by factors acting at various spatial scales. However, most studies to date have focused on the field or farm scales that only account for local (alpha) diversity, and these may underestimate the contribution of other diversity components (beta diversity) to total (gamma) farmland diversity. In this work, we aimed t...

Farmland birds have suffered significant declines in the last decades due to agricultural intensification. Agri-environment schemes (AES) aim to reverse this process by promoting “nature friendly” practises at the field-scale. AES based on the habitat requirements of target species have usually been successful, but the concurrence of species groups...

Agricultural intensification in the last six decades has caused the mayor decline of farmland birds across the world. Agri-environment schemes (AES) aim to reduce these pernicious effects of agriculture by modifying some harmful practices at the field scale. However, their effectiveness for promoting biodiversity has been questioned due to mixed re...

Worldwide agriculture is one of the main drivers of biodiversity decline. Effective conservation strategies depend on the type of relationship between biodiversity and land-use intensity, but to date the shape of this relationship is unknown. We linked plant species richness with nitrogen (N) input as an indicator of land-use intensity on 130 grass...

La Unión Europea intenta proteger la biodiversidad de la intensificación agrícola con medidas agroambientales. Pero su eficacia está condicionada por la complejidad del paisaje. Un estudio en Castilla-La Mancha incide en la importancia de los hábitats naturales y seminaturales en zonas cultivadas.

Para que las medidas agroambientales ayuden a mejorar la biodiversidad, no basta con que los agricultores las acepten y las apliquen bien. Hay que preguntarse hasta qué punto están sirviendo para beneficiar a la flora y fauna silvestres, y con la vista puesta en este objetivo, someterlas a evaluación y revisión continua.

Para que las medidas agroambientales ayuden a mejorar la biodiversidad, no basta con que los agricultores las acepten y las apliquen bien. Hay que preguntarse hasta qué punto están sirviendo para beneficiar a la flora y fauna silvestres, y con la vista puesta en este objetivo, someterlas a evaluación y revisión continua.

Las ayudas agroambientales de la Unión Europea no benefician a la fauna y la flora silvestres tanto como cabría esperar, según un estudio internacional en el que ha participado el Departamento de Ciencias Ambientales de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha y que se acaba de publicar en la revista Ecology Letters (vol. 9, pp. 243-54). En el estudio...