Regional Mountain Conference

Biodiversity monitoring programs are of increasing importance in both lowland and mountain regions. They generate continuous, large-scale, standardized datasets on the effects of land-use and climate change and allow the assessment of ecosystem conservation status at local and regional scales. However, a key challenge remains in translating these scientific outputs into effective policy action and decision-making processes.

In 2019, the government of the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol (Italy), in collaboration with Eurac Research, established a permanent, standardized long-term biodiversity monitoring program. This project involves interdisciplinary experts responsible for systematic data acquisition and for the dissemination of results to scientific and institutional stakeholders. The monitoring sites are distributed across the region based on a stratified random sampling design and cover a broad range of habitat types, including near-natural habitats such as high-mountain grasslands, alpine streams, and forests, as well as habitats subject to stronger anthropogenic influence, including meadows, vineyards, and urban areas. The surveyed taxa include vascular plants, cryptogams, birds, bats, and invertebrates, such as grasshoppers, butterflies, and soil-dwelling and freshwater macro-invertebrates. In addition, abiotic factors and landscape variables are collected at each site.

After seven years of monitoring, the resulting dataset supports a wide range of ecological analyses. In recent years, these have also resulted in a series of publications, which, in turn, provide the scientific basis for evidence-based recommendations to public authorities. For example, our results indicate that regional agri-environmental schemes effectively sustain high levels of biodiversity in meadows. Natural structural elements and an increased landscape heterogeneity enhance the richness and activity of highly mobile taxa, such as birds and bats, within agricultural and intensively cultivated landscapes. In lowland ditches, aquatic macroinvertebrate communities decline with increasing riparian management intensity, leading to the loss of sensitive species. These and other findings have been translated into practical guidelines for local practitioners, policy makers, protected area managers, and other stakeholders involved in conservation at the local level.

The presentation provides an overview of the project and presents the findings from the first seven years of implementation, highlighting concrete results and policy-relevant, evidence-based recommendations derived from the project outcomes.