Plant–animal interactions play a crucial role in ecosystem functioning, especially through seed dispersal mechanisms. Understanding how small mammal populations respond to seed availability is essential for ecosystem management and biodiversity...
Forest fungi provide recreational and economic services, as well as ecosystem biodiversity. Wild mushroom yields are difficult to estimate; climatic conditions are known to trigger temporally localised yields, and forest structure also affects produc...
Tree biomass and the diversity relationship in mixed forest have an impact on forest ecosystem services provisions. Tree biomass yield is driven by several aspects such as species identity, site condition, stand density, tree age and tree diversity e...
Estimating tree height is essential for modelling and managing both pure and mixed forest stands. Although height–diameter (H–D) relationships have been traditionally fitted for pure stands, attention must be paid when analyzing this rela...
Temperature and precipitation variability throughout the year control the intra-annual dynamics of tree-ring formation. Physiological adaptation of trees to climate change is among the key issues to better understand and predict future forest perform...
Timber assortments are some of the most important goods provided by forests worldwide. To quantify the amount and type of timber assortment is strongly important for socio-economic purposes, but also for accurate assessment of the carbon stored in th...
Leaf water potential (ψleaf) is a key indicator of plant water status, but its measurement is labor-intensive and limited in spatial coverage. While remote sensing has emerged as a useful tool for estimating vegetation water status, ψleaf rem...
In the Mediterranean, mixed forests of Aleppo pine and holm oak are widespread. Generally considered a transition stage in the succession towards climax oak communities, niche segregation may also contribute to the prevalence of these communities. So...
Mixed-species forests may deliver more forest functions and services than monocultures, as being considered more resistant to disturbances than pure stands. However, information on wood quality in mixed-species vs. corresponding pure forests is poor....
The availability of images with very high spatial and spectral resolution from airborne sensors or those aboard satellites is opening new possibilities for the analysis of fine-scale vegetation, such as the identification and classification of indivi...
Portuguese cork oak (Quercus suber L.) extended mortality and lack of regeneration have been the drivers of important changes in the traditional cork oak woodlands (savanna-like) montado. The decrease in tree cover fosters the mixture with stone pine...
Climate conditions have long been recognised as an important factor influencing the start and spread of forest fires in Mediterranean areas. This is partly due to the long dry periods that characterise these regions. Mixed forest ecosystems are more...
The use of mobile laser scanning to survey forest ecosystems is a promising, scalable technology to describe the 3D structure of forests at a high resolution. We use a structurally complex, mixed-species Mediterranean forest to test the performance o...
Forest ecosystems play an important role in hydrological processes as surface and subsurface runoff, as well as the storage of water at the catchment scale. Therefore, it is important to have a greater understanding of the effects of forests in the l...
The escalating threat of climate-driven wildfires, land abandonment, wildland–urban interface expansion, and inadequate forest management poses an existential challenge to Mediterranean oak ecosystems, for which traditional fire suppression has...
Mediterranean peri-urban forests play a crucial role in urban sustainability, yet their ecosystem services remain underexplored. This study quantifies and maps six regulating ecosystem services—carbon sequestration, air pollutant removal, surfa...
Understanding whether the occurrences of ectomycorrhizal species in a given tree host are phylogenetically determined can help in assessing different conservational needs for each fungal species. In this study, we characterized ectomycorrhizal phylog...
Wildfires play a significant role in many different elements of Mediterranean forest ecosystems. In recent years, prescribed fires have started being used more often as a fuel reduction tool, and also as silvicultural treatment to help the regenerati...
In Mediterranean countries, in the year 2017, extensive surfaces of forests were damaged by wildfires. In the Vesuvius National Park, multiple summer wildfires burned 88% of the Mediterranean forest. This unprecedented event in an environmentally vul...
Wildfires are a major ecological disturbance in Mediterranean forests, whose frequency and intensity are increasingly driven by climate change and land-use dynamics. This study investigated post-fire natural regeneration and soil properties in Aleppo...
Periodical outbreaks of Thaumetopoea pityocampa feeding on pine needles may pose a threat to Mediterranean coniferous forests by causing severe tree defoliation, growth reduction, and eventually mortality. To cost–effectively monitor the tempor...
Wildfire shapes vegetation assemblages in Mediterranean ecosystems, such as those in the state of California, United States. Successful restorative management of forests in-line with ecologically beneficial fire regimes relies on a thorough understan...
The Mediterranean basin has been a refugium for relict plant taxa and native laurophyllic forests. The Latium coasts and, especially, the Antica Lavinium site, host relict forest communities, whose natural importance is enriched by their cultural val...
Healthy diet patterns have a positive effect on chronic non-communicable diseases in the pediatric population, but the evidence is limited on the association between kidney impairment and adherence to a Mediterranean diet. We aim to determine the ass...
Climate and land-use changes have been contributing to the increase in the occurrence of extreme wildfires, shifting fire regimes and driving desertification, particularly in Mediterranean-climate regions. However, few studies have researched the inf...
Leaf area index (LAI) is a crucial biophysical indicator for assessing and monitoring the structure and functions of forest ecosystems. Improvements in remote sensing instrumental characteristics and the availability of more efficient statistical alg...
Understanding the influence of the current climate on the distribution, composition, and carbon storage capacity of Mediterranean tree species is key to determining future pathways under a warmer and drier climate scenario. Here, we evaluated the inf...
Biocrusts are associations of various prokaryotic and eukaryotic microorganisms in the top millimeters of soil, which can be found in every climate zone on Earth. They stabilize soils and introduce carbon and nitrogen into this compartment. The world...
A mixed integer goal programming model is developed to address the regeneration planning problems of even-aged forests in the Mediterranean region of Turkey. The unique aspect of the goal programming formulation is to minimize deviations in scheduled...
The Gulf of Corinth is a semi-isolated basin in central Greece interrupting the Pindus Mountain Range, which nowadays is a biodiversity hotspot. Considering its key location, deep drilling was carried out within the International Ocean Discovery Prog...
Metropolitan fringes in Southern Europe preserve, under different territorial contexts, natural habitats, relict woodlands, and mixed agro-forest systems acting as a sink of biodiversity and ecosystem services in ecologically vulnerable landscapes. C...
Large, mapped forest research plots are important sources of data to understand spatial and temporal changes in forest communities in the context of global change. Here, we describe the data from the first three censuses of the 16-ha UC Santa Cruz Fo...
Rapid human population growth accelerates biodiversity loss through urban habitat fragmentation, yet ecologically informed urban planning can mitigate these effects. This study evaluates whether and how vegetation characteristics, as captured by Eart...
In recent decades, climate change has significantly influenced the frequency and intensity of wildfires across Mediterranean pine forests. The loss of forest cover can bring long-term ecological changes that impact the overall biodiversity and alter...
In the last few years, the occurrence and abundance of tree-related microhabitats and habitat trees have gained great attention across Europe as indicators of forest biodiversity. Nevertheless, observing microhabitats in the field requires time and w...
Greece is a European hotspot for Orthoptera (378 species), yet it has been scarcely explored. We investigated the diversity patterns of Orthoptera and the ecological mechanisms shaping them by sampling 15 sites (30 plots of 1ha) across five habitats...
One of the most determining factors in forest fire behaviour is to characterize forest fuel attributes. We investigated a complex Mediterranean forest type—mountainous Abies pinsapo–Pinus–Quercus–Juniperus with distinct struct...
Although peri-urban landscapes in Southern Europe still preserve a relatively high level of biodiversity in relict natural places, urban expansion is progressively consuming agricultural land and, in some cases, forest cover. This phenomenon has (dir...
Soil moisture (SM) and temperature (ST) are critical factors in forest eco-hydrological research. In this study, we investigated the inter- and intra-annual changes in SM and ST profiles in a mixed Mediterranean maquis forest stand together with soil...
The application of modern technologies to increase the overall sustainability of forest operations is known as precision forest harvesting. Precision forest harvesting can be a very powerful tool; however, it requires modern forest machinery, which i...
Wildfire is a dominant ecological force in Mediterranean pine forests, and post-fire silvicultural practices can substantially alter their recovery trajectories. In this study, we examined how natural regeneration and artificial plantations influence...
High-resolution pollen analysis of a sediment core recovered from Paliouras lagoon (Greece) allowed us to reconstruct the environmental dynamics of the Halkidiki peninsula during the last 4000 years. Palynological results have been interpreted and co...
Forests play an important role in water and carbon cycles in semiarid regions such as the Mediterranean ecosystems. Previous research in the Chilean Mediterranean forests revealed a break point in 1980 in regional tree-ring chronologies linked to cli...
Forest logging can be detrimental for non-vascular epiphytes, determining the loss of key components for ecosystem functioning. Legal logging in a Mediterranean mixed oak forest (Tuscany, Central Italy) in 2016 heavily impacted sensitive non-vascular...
Triggered by frequent high temperatures and scarce precipitation, droughts are a recurrent phenomenon in the Mediterranean Basin, causing significant impacts on forests. We analyzed the effects of drought intensity, duration, and seasonality on tree...
Common cyclamen (Cyclamen purpurascens Mill.) is the only representative of its genus in Slovenia where it is a widespread species, growing from sea level to high mountainous areas. It thrives in all four major phytogeographic regions: Alpine, Dinari...
Natural and anthropogenic factors affect forest structure worldwide, primarily affecting forest canopy and its light properties. However, not only stand-replacing events modify canopy structure, but disturbances of lower intensity can also have impor...
Forest and rural fires are one of the main causes of environmental degradation in Mediterranean countries. Existing fire detection systems only focus on detection, but not on the verification of the fire. However, almost all of them are just simulati...
Increasing aridity and climate extremes are challenging the resilience of key Mediterranean species. Proxies that indicate plant water status, physiological condition and soil water availability are valuable tools for management planning. However, th...
The first inventory of the flora of Appia Antica Regional Park (Italy), one of the largest protected urban areas in Europe (4580 ha), its biological, ecological and biogeographical composition, and notes of the vegetation physiognomies and landscape...
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