Protect butterflies across Europe through climate refugia

Project Information

PROBAE

Grant agreement ID: 101024579

DOI

10.3030/101024579

Project terminated on 31 March 2023

EC signature date 14 April 2021

Start date 1 August 2022

End date 31 July 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 191 149,44

EU contribution

€ 191 149,44

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE DE LAUSANNE
Switzerland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PROBAE (Protect butterflies across Europe through climate refugia)

Reporting period: 2022-08-01 to 2024-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Despite accelerating climate change, our understanding of the ecology and distributions of pollinator insects remains scarce. This is problematic because while being sensitive, cold-blooded taxa, insects provide many vital services to human societies (e.g. pollination). We therefore need to identify which geographical areas will suffer the most for expected patterns in climatic change, so that we can act to protect these creatures and the services that they provide to our societies.

As Europe transitions to more sustainable societies, it is important to identify regions that will allow maximizing investments in area-based conservation actions. Such goals are expected as part of recent international commitments, including the EU Pollinators Initiative and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

PROBAE set the goal of developing a framework to identify areas of conservation priority for pollinator insects across Europe, focusing on butterflies and climate change refugia (i.e. areas of predicted low impact of climate change). The framework has been developed and applied to the butterflies of Italy (Riva et al. 2023, Global Change Biology 29 (7), 1715-1728). Ongoing work will expand the application of this framework to the European continent, evaluating butterfly population trends across Europe in relation to environmental gradients and climate change exposure.

No website has been developed for the project; however, a brief description of PROBAE and all papers published during the fellowship have been uploaded at https://federicoriva.github.io/riva_ecology. Future publications related to PROBAE will also be listed in this website.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Since the beginning of the fellowship (August 2022), the project has resulted in a modeling pipeline that generates quickly and serially species distribution models (SDMs) across spatial grains, and tested it using the case study of the butterflies of Italy (Riva et al. 2023, Global Change Biology 29 (7), 1715-1728). The fellow also led a review of the field of Complex System Science in ecology and conservation (Riva, Graco-Roza et al. 2023, Science Advances, in press). This second project was included in PROBAE because the assumptions underlying traditional SDMs might be unreasonable as climates change abruptly (e.g. due to tipping points), requiring the exploration of alternative approaches to identify hotspots of conservation value based on climate change refugia (e.g. evaluating networks of interacting species, instead of individual species distribution models). Ongoing work based on thousands of population trends for butterflies will assess the drivers of demographic change in butterfly populations across Europe, capitalizing on extensive citizen science data.

Preliminary analyses conducted in Italy identified land use as an important determinant of the distribution of butterfly species even at scales of 50 by 50 km cells. This means that identifying climate change refugia without considering land use change will be at best inaccurate. Implementation of this framework across Europe will ensure the identification of proper conservation hotspots based on climate change refugia that account for land use patterns and forecasted change. The review we published on Complex System Science in ecology and conservation (Riva, Graco-Roza et al. 2023, Science Advances, in press) has outlined a series of philosophies and paradigms that will be explored as the European-scale trends in butterfly populations are assessed.


I have shared via social media the first output of PROBAE with success. Based on Altmetric (https://wiley.altmetric.com/details/141778947) Riva et al. 2023 (Global Change Biology 29 (7), 1715-1728) ranks in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. Our review of Complex System Science also has already received attention. I will participate at two conferences in Summer 2023 - Biology of Butterflies Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, and the International Congress for Conservation Biology, Kigali, Rwanda - to present the result of butterfly population trends across Europe and related drivers.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

PROBAE has generated information beyond the state of the art through products including the development of a novel analytical framework to understand how the distribution of species will respond to land use and climate change across spatial scales (Riva et al. 2023, Global Change Biology 29 (7), 1715-1728). Developing this framework was necessary because Europe is among the most intensely managed continents on Earth, such that climatic effects must be understood contextually to land use. I have tested the framework using an extensive dataset including all the butterflies of Italy (~ 40% of the European butterflies). Ongoing analysis of population trends for the butterflies of Europe will represent the largest longitudinal analysis for these insects in the continent, and provide vital insights on the driver of demography for these taxa in the face of climate change.

In terms of potential impacts, Riva et al. (2023, Global Change Biology 29 (7), 1715-1728) has been already discussed at national meetings in the context of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The European analysis of population trends is expected to provide important information for the application of area-based targets across the continent (e.g. 30 by 30 goal, where 30% of terrestrial areas are expected to be reserved to nature by 2030). The participation of the fellow to two international meeting - the Biology of Butterflies meeting (Prague, Czech Republic) and International Congress for Conservation Biology (Kigali, Rwanda) - will facilitate the dissemination of the fellowship results with stakeholders and policy makers, as well as academics.

Illustration of the framework developed to identify climate change refugia for butterflies