Abstract. A precise knowledge of the spatial distribution of taxa is essential for decision-making processes in land management and biodiversity conservation, both for present and under future global change scenarios. This is a key base for several scientific disciplines (e.g. macro-ecology, biogeography, evolutionary biology, spatial planning, or environmental impact assessment) that rely on species distribution maps. An atlas summarizing the distribution of European amphibians and reptiles with 50 × 50 km resolution maps based on ca. 85 000 grid records was published by the Societas Europaea Herpetologica (SEH) in 1997. Since then, more detailed species distribution maps covering large parts of Europe became available, while taxonomic progress has led to a plethora of taxonomic changes including new species descriptions. To account for these progresses, we compiled information from different data sources: published in books and websites, ongoing national atlases, personal data kindly provided to the SEH, the 1997 European Atlas, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Databases were homogenised, deleting all information except species names and coordinates, projected to the same coordinate system (WGS84) and transformed into a 50 × 50 km grid. The newly compiled database comprises more than 384 000 grid and locality records distributed across 40 countries. We calculated species richness maps as well as maps of Corrected Weighted Endemism and defined species distribution types (i.e. groups of species with similar distribution patterns) by hierarchical cluster analysis using Jaccard's index as association measure. Our analysis serves as a preliminary step towards an interactive, dynamic and online distributed database system (NA2RE system) of the current spatial distribution of European amphibians and reptiles. The NA2RE system will serve as well to monitor potential temporal changes in their distributions. Grid maps of all species are made available along with this paper as a tool for decision-making and conservation-related studies and actions. We also identify taxonomic and geographic gaps of knowledge that need to be filled, and we highlight the need to add temporal and altitudinal data for all records, to allow tracking potential species distribution changes as well as detailed modelling of the impacts of land use and climate change on European amphibians and reptiles.

Protecting native biodiversity against alien invasive species requires powerful methods to anticipate these invasions and to protect native species assumed to be at risk. Here, we describe how species distribution models (SDMs) can be used to identify areas predicted as both suitable for rare native species and highly susceptible to invasion by alien species, at present and under future climate and land-use scenarios. To assess the condition and dynamics of such conflicts, we developed a combined predictive modelling (CPM) approach, which predicts species distributions by combining two SDMs fitted using subsets of predictors classified as acting at either regional or local scales. We illustrate the CPM approach for an alien invader and a rare species associated with similar habitats in northwest Portugal. Combined models predict a wider variety of potential species responses, providing more informative projections of species distributions and future dynamics than traditional, non-combined models. They also provide more informative insight regarding current and future rare-invasive conflict areas. For our studied species, conflict areas of highest conservation relevance are predicted to decrease over the next decade, supporting previous reports that some invasive species may contract their geographic range and impact due to climate change. More generally, our results highlight the more informative character of the combined approach to address practical issues in conservation and management programs, especially those aimed at mitigating the impact of invasive plants, land-use and climate changes in sensitive regions.

There is growing urgency for integration and coordination of global environmental and ecological data and indicators required to respond to the 'grand challenges' the planet is facing, including climate change and biodiversity decline. A consistent stratification of land into relatively homogenous strata provides a valuable spatial framework for comparison and analysis of ecological and environmental data across large heterogeneous areas. We discuss how statistical stratification can be used to design national, European and global biodiversity observation networks. The value of strategic ecological survey based on stratified samples is first illustrated using the United Kingdom (UK) Countryside Survey, a national monitoring programme that has measured ecological change in the UK countryside for the last 35 years. We then present a design for a European-wide sampling design for monitoring common habitats, and discuss ways of extending these approaches globally, supported by the recently developed Global Environmental Stratification. The latter provides a robust spatial analytical framework for the identification of gaps in current monitoring efforts, and systematic design of new complementary monitoring and research. Examples from Portugal and the transboundary Kailash Sacred Landscape in the Himalayas illustrate the potential use of this stratification, which has been identified as a focal geospatial dataset within the Group on Earth Observation Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON).

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Global environmental changes are rapidly affecting species’ distributions and habitat suitability worldwide, requiring a continuous update of biodiversity status to support effective decisions on conservation policy and management. In this regard, satellite-derived Ecosystem Functional Attributes (EFAs) offer a more integrative and quicker evaluation of ecosystem responses to environmental drivers and changes than climate and structural or compositional landscape attributes. Thus, EFAs may hold advantages as predictors in Species Distribution Models (SDMs) and for implementing multi-scale species monitoring programs. Here we describe a modelling framework to assess the predictive ability of EFAs as Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) against traditional datasets (climate, land-cover) at several scales. We test the framework with a multi-scale assessment of habitat suitability for two plant species of conservation concern, both protected under the EU Habitats Directive, differing in terms of life history, range and distribution pattern (Iris boissieri and Taxus baccata). We fitted four sets of SDMs for the two test species, calibrated with: interpolated climate variables; landscape variables; EFAs; and a combination of climate and landscape variables. EFA-based models performed very well at the several scales (AUCmedian from 0.881±0.072 to 0.983±0.125), and similarly to traditional climate-based models, individually or in combination with land-cover predictors (AUCmedian from 0.882±0.059 to 0.995±0.083). Moreover, EFA-based models identified additional suitable areas and provided valuable information on functional features of habitat suitability for both test species (narrowly vs. widely distributed), for both coarse and fine scales. Our results suggest a relatively small scale-dependence of the predictive ability of satellite-derived EFAs, supporting their use as meaningful EBVs in SDMs from regional and broader scales to more local and finer scales. Since the evaluation of species’ conservation status and habitat quality should as far as possible be performed based on scalable indicators linking to meaningful processes, our framework may guide conservation managers in decision-making related to biodiversity monitoring and reporting schemes.