Biology subjects

Pettorelli, N.

Publications and source records attributed to Pettorelli, N..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Systematic mapping shows monitoring, evaluation, and engagement are needed to build an evidence base for rewilding

Rewilding is a landscape recovery approach that seeks to enhance functioning of degraded ecosystems by reinstating natural processes and is increasingly being adopted by organisations and landowners. Despite its popularity, there is no accepted way to assess rewildings impacts. This is due in part to inconsistent monitoring and evaluation. Here we report the results from a systematic map of the academic and grey literature on monitoring and evaluation in rewilding case studies. We find that researchers and practitioners are focused on different aspects of rewilding, and that limited recording of case study details and lack of robust experimental design make it difficult to pool and compare data. We identify challenges facing researchers and rewilding practitioners seeking to build a robust evidence base from which to evaluate rewilding outcomes. These challenges include resources as well as spatial and time constraints, which all limit the consistency of data gathering among projects. More comparisons across rewilding projects, better standardisation of data collection and data recording methods, and increased collaboration between researchers and practitioners could go some way to remedy this. We provide recommendations for planning and implementing studies of rewilded landscapes to aid monitoring and evaluation. These include the broad adoption of low-cost and scalable survey designs with greater focus on comparisons across sites, and continued effort towards open-source data storage.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Prioritising Functionally Distinct and Globally Endangered (FuDGE) sharks for conservation action

Robust species-level methods for quantifying ecological differences have yet to be incorporated into conservation strategies. Here, we present a conservation prioritisation approach that integrates species trait data and extinction risk to quantify the contribution of individual species to overall functional diversity. The Functionally Irreplaceable with Risk of Extinction (FIRE) metric directs conservation action to species whose extinction is expected to result in significant losses of functional diversity. We applied our framework to sets of species at the global scale. First we assessed the worlds birds, highlighting congruent and divergent priorities identified by trait-based and phylogenetic approaches. Second, we applied FIRE to the worlds sharks, exploring the impact of imputed traits on prioritisation robustness. For birds and sharks, we show that prioritising by functional irreplaceability is an effective strategy to conserve exploited species. The FIRE metric provides a robust tool to facilitate the incorporation of functional diversity into conservation policy and practice, revealing species that may be overlooked by existing approaches.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Land use configuration shapes climate change risk to gallery forests in a savannah ecosystem

Interactions between anthropogenic pressures make it difficult to predict biodiversity change and plan conservation interventions. Climate change is expected to drive widespread ecological change in the tropics over the coming decades, but it is unclear where and when these changes are going to intensify, or reduce, the impacts of additional pressures from human land use. To address this uncertainty, we apply a novel risk assessment framework to show how land use configuration modifies risks arising from climate change to gallery forests, an important vegetation type in tropical savannahs. Our analysis shows that the spatial distribution of climate change (specifically, change in annual rainfall) interacts with the spatial distribution of land use (specifically, cropland), as well as the biophysical context of the study site (the W-Arly-Pendjari transboundary protected area in West Africa), to shape the risk that changes in rainfall pose to gallery forests in the region. Due to the pathways by which rainfall change and land use interact, risks are especially elevated in core protected areas, warranting particular attention from conservation managers. Overall, our work illustrates how unexpected patterns in risks can arise through interactions between pressures on biodiversity, highlighting the importance of considering mechanistic pathways for predicting biodiversity outcomes under multifacetted global environmental change.

ecology↗