Biology subjects

Si-moussi, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Si-moussi, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Accounting for social feasibility in landscape-scale scenarios for restoring nature beyond protected areas

1. Global restoration targets, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the European Union's Nature Restoration Regulation, call for extending restoration beyond protected area boundaries to reconnect isolated ecosystems, yet implementing these landscape-scale interventions forces trade-offs between biophysical effectiveness and social feasibility. 2. In the Grenoble region of the French Alps, we used a gradient analysis of 12 ecosystem services across protected area interfaces to design and compare two restoration scenarios. Both were built from the same set of co-selected interventions but differed only in their spatial allocation: a 'Technical' scenario targeting areas of low ecosystem service continuity around protected areas, and a 'Participatory' scenario co-designed with local stakeholders. 3. Both scenarios physically modified about 14.5% of the landscape, mostly through a forest-based adaptation strategy, yet their effects reached up to more than 60% of the territory for the most connectivity-dependent services, showing that benefits propagate well beyond the area directly modified. 4. The two scenarios diverged mainly in how they treated agricultural land. The Technical scenario reduced abrupt drops in ecosystem service provision at the protected area edge nearly twice as often as the Participatory one (46% versus 26% of the sharp declines it addressed), and at six locations removed them entirely. However, it concentrated over 99% of its non-forest effort in agricultural diversification, such as diversifying crops and adding hedgerows, the action stakeholders ranked hardest to implement, whereas the Participatory scenario favoured more feasible actions such as river restoration, which met less resistance but missed several critical discontinuities in ecosystem service supply. 5. These contrasts show that biophysical potential and social feasibility can pull restoration in different directions, and that the more effective spatial configuration is not necessarily the more implementable one. 6. Closing the implementation gap for nature-based solutions depended less on expanding the area restored than on where interventions were placed. Gradient-based diagnostics appear most useful not as fixed prescriptions but as tools to steer existing sectoral funding in agriculture, urban planning and forestry toward high-impact locations, an approach transferable to other regions working to reconnect protected areas with their surrounding landscapes as coupled social-ecological systems.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Synergies and trade-offs between maintaining climate niche variability and preserving climate stability

The impact of climate change on biodiversity accelerates, calling for climate resilient conservation strategies such as protecting areas of high climatic stability (i.e. climate refugia) or protecting the variability of species climatic niches (to preserve adaptive potential). Developing a spatial framework that integrates both strategies, we identify priorities to protect climatic niche components of 1,207 European vertebrates. Priority areas for protecting climatic niches under low climate velocity or low magnitude were respectively found in mountainous/southern regions and in northern/eastern Europe. These synergy areas overlapped by 48-73% with single-objective prioritizations focused on either niche components or climatic stability. Trade-offs occur where climatic niches diversity is high but climate stability is low, such as eastern Europe (velocity) or the Mediterranean and North Fennoscandia (magnitude). Our results reveal spatial mismatches between climate refugia and spatial priorities to preserve adaptive potential, emphasizing the need to combine both strategies in conservation planning.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Causal discovery from ecological time-series with one timestamp and multiple observations

Ecologists often aim to uncover causal relations within ecological systems using observational data. However, many studies still rely mainly on correlation-based approaches, which do not support causal interpretation. Causal discovery methods have recently gained interest, particularly for ecological time-series data. Yet such data are often scarce, as collecting repeated and consistent measurements over long periods is costly, require strict continuation of protocols and is time-consuming. Consequently, ecologists have often access only to single-time-point observational data generated by dynamical systems. In this setting, unobserved past states can induce substantial unmeasured confounding, limiting the ability of standard algorithms such as PC and FCI to recover micro-level causal relations between observed variables. We show that PC and FCI can nevertheless recover meaningful causal information. In particular, they can identify specific cluster-level structures, which we call clustered super-unshielded colliders, which provide information about the partial causal ordering of macro-level variables. We further show that both algorithms can be reduced to a simple procedure, which we call RestPC, that yields the same identifiable information. We illustrate our results using simulated data and two real-world datasets: one on bird abundance, climate, and land cover, and another on soil microbial communities, environmental, terrain, and geochemical variables.

ecology↗