Direct and indirect ecological drivers of bird communities in intensively cultivated landscapes.

Agriculture has played a pivotal role in shaping European mountain biodiversity. Traditional practices, characterized by low intensity and crop mosaics, have historically created complex, heterogeneous landscapes that supported a high biodiversity level. Agricultural intensification has turned these traditional crop systems into artificial habitats, leading to increased field sizes, habitat fragmentation, and decrease of habitat heterogeneity, contributing to the current farmland biodiversity crisis.

A classification-occupancy model based on automatically identified species data.

Occupancy models estimate a species' occupancy probability while accounting for imperfect detection, but often overlook the issue of false-positive detections. This problem of false positives has gained attention recently with the rapid advancement of automated species detection tools using artificial intelligence (AI), which generate continuous confidence scores for each species detection. Novel occupancy models have been introduced that integrate these confidence scores to identify false positives, but these models require thorough assessments of diagnosis and validation.

Global impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on biodiversity data collection.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered different governmental responses across borders, with cascading effects on people's movements and on biodiversity data collection. We quantified changes in the number of species occurrence records collected during the first global lockdown (March 15th to May 1st 2020) relative to pre-pandemic levels using data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). We modelled how such changes relate to the stringency of governmental policy responses, changes in human mobility, and countries' population size and economic class across 129 countries.

Landscape-level heterogeneity of agri-environment measures improves habitat suitability for farmland birds.

Agri-environment schemes (AESs), ecological focus areas (EFAs), and organic farming are the main tools of the common agricultural policy (CAP) to counteract the dramatic decline of farmland biodiversity in Europe. However, their effectiveness is repeatedly doubted because it seems to vary when measured at the field-versus-landscape level and to depend on the regional environmental and land-use context. Understanding the heterogeneity of their effectiveness is thus crucial to developing management recommendations that maximize their efficacy.