This year the ICCB (27th International Congress for Conservation Biology; 4th European Congress for Conservation Biology) was held in Montpellier, France (2-6 August 2015). GMA lab members participated organizing a symposium, presenting 5 oral interventions and 3 posters!

Michela Pacifici presented as one of the finalist of the student award!

Symposium

Di Marco & Rondinini – Advances on human pressure quantification and biodiversity monitoring under global change

Oral interventions

Santini, Cornulier, Bullock, Palmer, White, Bocedi, Hodgson, Rondinini, Travis – modeling spread rate in terrestrial mammals and the ability to track a shifting climate: a trait space approach

Baisero & Rondinini – the influence of protected area selection criteria on measures of conservation effort

Pacifici, Visconti, Watson, Rondinini – Ecological and biological characteristics explain the response of species to recent climatic changes

Di Marco, Collen, Rondinini, Mace – Historical drivers of extinction risk: using past evidence to direct future monitoring

Rondinini – Challanges for combining indicators, models and scenarios of human pressure and biodiversity response into a coherent story

Posters

Di Marco & Santini – Human pressures predict species’ geographic range size better than biological traits

Santini, Saura, Rondinini – connectivity of the global network of protected areas

Rondinini, Visconti – Decline of european large mammals under global change scenarios

Michela Pacifici presenting “Italian hotspots of mammal species vulnerable to climate change”
and
Luca Santini awarded for the best publication on Hystrix, the Italian Journal of Mammalogy, for the paper
“Santini L., Di Marco M., Visconti P., Baisero D., Boitani L., Rondinini C. 2013. Ecological correlates of dispersal distance in terrestrial mammals. Hystrix, the Italian Journal of Mammalogy 24(2)

The abstracts of our oral presentations and posters were published and are available on Hystrix vol. 25(special issue)

Tittensor D.P., Walpole M., Hill S.L.L., Boyce D.G., Britten G.L., Burgess N.D., Butchart S.H.M., Leadley P.W., Regan E.C., Alkamade R., Baumung R., Bellard C., Bouwman L., Bowles-Newark N.J., Chenery A.M., Cheung W.W.L., Christensen V., Cooper H.D., Crowther A.R., Dixon M.J.R., Galli A., Gaveau V., Gregory R.D., Gutierrez N.L., Hirsch T., Hoft R., Januchowski-Hartley S.R., Karmann M., Krug C.B., Leverington F.J., Loh J., Lojenga R.K., Malsch K., Marques A., Morgan D.H.W., Mumby P.J., Newbold T., Noonan-Mooney K., Pagad S.N., Parks B.C., Pereira H.M., Robertson T., Rondinini C., Santini L., Scharlemann J.P.W., Schindler S., Sumaila U.R., Teh L.S.L., van Kolck J., Visconti P., Ye Y.

In 2010 the international community, under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed on 20 biodiversity-related “Aichi Targets” to be achieved within a decade. We provide a comprehensive mid-term assessment of progress toward these global targets using 55 indicator data sets. We projected indicator trends to 2020 using an adaptive statistical framework that incorporated the specific properties of individual time series. On current trajectories, results suggest that despite accelerating policy and management responses to the biodiversity crisis, the impacts of these efforts are unlikely to be reflected in improved trends in the state of biodiversity by 2020. We highlight areas of societal endeavor requiring additional efforts to achieve the Aichi Targets, and provide a baseline against which to assess future progress.

Santini L., Di Marco M., Visconti P., Baisero D., Boitani L., Rondinini C. 2013. Ecological correlates of dispersal distance in terrestrial mammals. Hystrix 24(2): 1-6.

Abstract. Dispersal distance in mammals is a fundamental information for several ecological and conservation applications. Although dispersal can depend on many intrinsic and extrinsic factors, in recent years many studies have shown that it scales with body size and home range area. However, the role of further ecological correlates to distance travelled is still unclear and the predictive models proposed so far have suffered from small sample size and lack of error estimates. This reduces the practical relevance of the models for ecological and conservation applications. We conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis on 327 studies on the dispersal of 164 mammal species, and performed linear and non-linear regression analyses to explore the relationships of body size and home range area with dispersal distance. We tested the effect of various life history traits and ecological factors on the relationships and performed a sensitivity analysis to evaluate the robustness of the models to sample size. The linear relationships of both home range and body size with dispersal distance were influenced by various life history traits and ecological factors. We developed allometric functions to estimate species dispersal distance based on different predictors and life history traits. Linear models representing the relationship between dispersal distance and body size or home range area received good support; however logistic models better approximates both relationships. Despite receiving less support than a logistic curve, a linear model between dispersal and home range is a good approximation for applicative purposes. Sensitivity analysis showed that our results are robust to subsampling of the original dataset until a sample of 40 species. Our empirical models have the potential to improve theoretical and applied population biology studies by extending the applicability and improving the accuracy of dispersal distance estimation to a large number of mammals.