Carmen together with Gabriel, Frieda, Vojta, Francois, Kaca, and Petr have new paper in Global Ecology and Biogeography.

It’s a big empirical evaluation of patterns of autocorrelation (clumping, aggregation) of real-world species distributions in four regions. We look at how autocorrelated the distribution are, how this changes in time, and also how it looks at different spatial scales.

Among other things, the paper shows that species which are losing occupied area (losers) are first starting with a loss of isolated populations. Interestingly, species which are expanding their distributions (winners) do so by colonizing isolated places first, i.e. they do not expand ranges contiguously from the edges.

This is a new way of looking at temporal dynamics of biodiversity, which has so far predominantly focused on simple losses and gains.

Here a figure from the paper showing how temporal changes of species aggregation and occupancy are related:

Francois and Petr, together with Marta Jarzyna from Ohio State University published a new paper in Science.

Using 1033 North American Breeding Bird Survey routes, we analyzed abundance change and its acceleration for 261 bird species, 54 avian families, and 10 habitats from 1987 to 2021. We show an average continent-wide decline of abundance of all birds per local route, with hotspots of decline in southern and warm parts of North America and hotspots of accelerating decline in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and California, matching patterns of agricultural intensity. In contrast to the acceleration, the decline itself is more associated with patterns of temperature.

These are the most important novelties which brought the paper all the way to Science:

• We focus on acceleration, a shift from the traditional focus on simple declines or increases.
• We use cutting edge Bayesian models which account for imperfect detection, and we propagate the uncertainty of our estimates to as many steps of the analyses as possible.
• We were surprised to discover the signal of agriculture in the acceleration, but not in the decline itself. The latter seems to be more affected by temperature. In hindsight, however, the negative effect of agriculture seems plausible. This also shows that different aspects of temporal dynamics (e.g. decline vs its acceleration) can have different drivers.
• We offer a conceptual framework to study change of other phenomena. We suggest that ecologists should focus more on second derivations (acceleration or deceleration).

The article was also reported by New York Times, Washington Post or Associated Press among many outlets.

On January 12-14 2026 we organized a workshop at our faculty (FZP CZU) where we discussed the potential new analyses which can be done with gridded atlas data. These were intensive 3 days, and a lot of fun, so thanks to all the guests for coming, and thanks Katka for the fantastic organization!

External guests: Marta Jarzyna (Ohio State University), Brian McGill (University of Maine), Ines Martins (University of York), Naia Morueta-Holme (University of Copenhagen), Carsten Meyer (iDiv, Leipzig), David Storch (Charles University)

MOBI lab main crew: Mel Tietje, Flo Grattarola, Gabriel Ortega, Carmen Soria, Petr Keil

Other MOBI folks who visited for a part of the workshop: Kaca Tschernosterova, Elisa Padulosi, Adam Ulicny, Dani Mellado-Mansilla

Organization, logistics: Katka Hajkova

On January 6-10 2026, seven of us went the 12th Biennial conference of the International Biogeography Society (TIBS) in Aarhus, Denmark [conference website]. I think that we made quite a strong presence there, we reconnected with many colleagues, established new collaborations, so big thanks to the MOBI team. Also, kudos to the organizing committee, the conference was magnificent, as always.

These were our oral talks:

• Flo Grattarola: Themporal change and drivers of multiple facets of biodiversity at mesoscales.
• Gabriele Midolo: Six decades of biodiversity changes in European plant communities.
• Carmen Soria: The velocity of biodiversity change: applying the climate velocity framework to biodiversity metrics.
• Mel Tietje: Large-scale bird co-occurrence stability over time.

These were our posters:

• Gabriel Ortega: One metric to rule them all? A global assessment of the importance of shape complexity for the environmental heterogeneity of protected areas.
• Elisa Padulosi: A cross-disciplinary framework for temporal dynamics across community ecology, landscape ecology, and remote sensing.
• Petr Keil: Compiling data on contemporary biodiversity change at meso scales.

Gabri and Petr, together with our partners from the GRACE project, and with many other European botanists have published a new paper in Ecology Letters.

The paper shows how specied diversity of plants in local communities changed over the past 60 years, in four distinct environments (forests, grasslands, scrub, and wetlands), and in seven major biogeographic regions.

All of this can be explored in a lovely online interactive map. Check it out!

This analysis is based on hundreds of thousands of botanical plots, it is independently validated, and given its sheer volume of data and large geographic extent, it is among the most comprehensive assessments of what is going on with species richness of European vegetation so far.

Ivo, Adam, Petr and Flo published a new data paper in Nature Conservation.

The paper announces a new effort to compile data on regional red lists (hence RegRed). A red list is an assessment of threat status of multiple species, usually in a given taxonomic group in a given country. Regional red lists are different from the global red list administered by IUCN, since a globally threatened species can still be doing well in some regions, and vice versa, i.e. species which is doing well globally can still be threatened, or even extinct, in some countries. This information has so far been collected by the National Red List database (NRL) curated by Zoological Society of London. In RegRed, we have been building on NRL.

The present paper is the beggining of our effort. Specifically, Ivo and Adam (coordinated by Flo and Petr) went meticulously through every country in the world, and searched for all red lists that have been published in the coutnry. The result is this paper.

In a follow-up effort, we have been collating and digitizing the redlists - stay tuned for updates!

If you are interested in being part of this effort, get in touch!

Petr Keil, Elisa Padulosi and Mel Tietje attended the 2025 annual meeting of Ecological Society of America (ESA) conference (10.-15. August 2025) in Baltimore in the United States.

• Petr gave a talk on Temporal change of known and less known facets of biodiversity at meso- and macro-scales

• Mel presented a poster on Large-scale co-occurrence dynamics in bird assemblages

• Elisa presented a poster on A review comparing temporal dynamics in community ecology, landscape ecology, and remote sensing: Issues of metrics and scale

Petr and Francois, together with Vojta Bartak (FZP CZU) and Adam T. Clark (from University of Graz) published a new theoretical paper in Ecology and Evolution.

During the ongoing transformation of biosphere, we have been witnessing a global loss of biodiversity, but locally, there are as many declines as there are increases of species diversity, with zero average change. This is the so called the biodiversity conservation paradox.

In this new paper we offer a mechanistic explanation of this paradox. Using simulations, we show that the key to understanding is density-dependent death rate. For instance, when per-capite death rate is higher in smaller populations (or in species with small geographic ranges), we observe high global, but low local extinction rates. It is a simple mechanism, but it has not yet been demonstrated.

We hope that a plausible mechanism will help us to better communicate that the global biodiversity change is likely a different beast locally and globally. At the same time, we also offer a single link between the local and global changes. This link is where conservation efforts should be aimed if we want to address the multi-scale biodiversity loss.

MOBI lab went for a weekend to CZU cottage in Janov nad Nisou (Jizerske hory). This was not about work, we spent the weekend cooking, hiking, making fire, and taking the advantage of a beautiful early spring weather, with bits of snow here and there.

We were joined by some significant others, and also by international members of Center for Theoretical Study and Antonin Machac’s group.

Flo, Kaca and Petr published a new data paper in Nature Conservation. It provides an analysis-ready dataset on distributional data on 63 species of carnivores in Latin America. Apart from the common presence-only data, it also compiles 45,468 presence-absence records from camera traps. These are invaluable in species distribution modelling as they allow to estimate true probability of occurrence.

Gabri and Petr, together with GRACE project co-authors, published a new study in Landscape Ecology. It shows that nineteenth-century land use shapes the current occurrence of some plant species, but it only weakly affects the richness and total composition of Central European grasslands.

This is the first major outcome of our GRACE GACR project, and it’s mostly thanks to Gabri’s incredible work.

Here is a map of grassland sites included in the study:

On the 6th of January 2025 Melanie Tietje joined MOBI lab as a postdoc within the BEAST ERC project.

Welcome Mel!

Flo, Kaca, and Petr published a new study that explores temporal trends of occupancy and range size in 5 charismatic species of Neotropical carnivores.

We have found a generally declining trend in four species. These is alarming, more so given that these species had been classified as not threatened by IUCN. The official global threat status of these species may need to be re-evaluated. All this would be invisible if standard forecasts, local expert knowledge, or static threat criteria, such as range size, were used.

Francois started his PhD with us in tough covid times four years ago, he managed to survive all the pitfalls of the Czech system, produced some lovely papers and science along the way, and it was always fun. What a special day today.

Good luck Francois on your future academic journey!

Also, many thanks to the oponents David Hořák, Vladimír Remeš, Martin Bulla.

On the 1st of October 2024 Elisa Padulosi joined MOBI lab as a PhD student within the BEAST ERC project.

Welcome Elisa!

Frieda Wölke, Carmen Soria, Francois Leroy and Petr Keil attended the GfÖ Macroecology meeting in Marburg conference (12.-14. June 2024) at University of Marburg in Germany.

Francois gave a talk:

• Leroy F, Jarzyna M, Keil P: Acceleration and demographic rates of bird decline in North America

We also had posters:

• Wölke F, Soria C, Ortega G, Ueta M, Šťastný K, Bejček V, Mikuláš I, Keil P: Towards predicting temporal biodiversity changes from static patterns

• Carmen D. Soria, Ortega G, Barták V, Wölke F, Ueta M, Šťastný K, Bejček V, Mikuláš I, Voříšek P, Keil P: Patterns of spatial autocorrelation for species distributions and diversity across time and spatial scales

• Keil P, Grattarola F, Leroy F, Ortega G, Soria C, Wolke F: Nature in a mesh: common problems with gridded biodiversity data, and proposed solutions

Petr and Francois are co-authors on a new study led by our colleague Dominika Prajzlerova. The study tests if species diversity of birds can be predicted by various metrics of spectral diversity in the Czech Republic.

Flo Grattarola, Frieda Wölke, Káča Tschernosterová participated on the Empowering Biodiversity Research conference (24.-28. March 2024) in the Naturals Biodiversity Centre in Leiden, The Netherlands.

The focus was on aspects of biodiversity informatics and using biodiversity data for research and policy. The conference represented a great update on the progress and current work of some initiatives such as the European Commission (Directorate-General for Environment), GBIF, Biodiversa+, BirdWatch, BiCIKL, Data4Nature (private sector), MAMBO (monitoring), ARISE, DISSCO (collections); and information on initiatives/projects that collect/gather different data types: camera traps (Agouti), DNA-based ones (Naturalis, ELIXIR, VIB UGent), specimen collections (Meise Botanic Garden), culture collections (MIRRI), taxonomy (COL connection with GBIF, TETTRIS), sound and images (Naturalist), remote sensing (LifeWatch, MAMBO).

Káča presented poster titled: SPARSE 1.0: a template for databases of species inventories, with an open example of Czech birds with Eva Tráníčková, Florencia Grattarola, Clara Rosse and Petr Keil as co-authors. For more info about the content see the associated paper in Biodiversity Data Journal.

Manuele has published his first paper in Journal of Ecology presenting results of his COCOS Marie Curie project in MOBI lab. The paper explores how grasslands (specifically, their biomass) resist extreme droughts, and how they recover if they get hit. Spoiler: It depends on biodiversity.

There is also a lovely blog post explaining what are the main findings. Check it out!

Congratulations Manu!

Are you a master student in your final year? Are you pondering carreer in research? I offer a fully funded, 3+ years, full-time PhD position in space-borne remote sensing and biodiversity.

The position is part our ERC-funded project BEAST (“Biodiversity dynamics across a continuum of space, time, and their scales”) which studies how biodiversity has changed in time at local, regional, and continental scales, during the last 50 years. The focus is on terrestrial taxa (vertebrates, plants) and facets of biodiversity which can be remotely sensed from satellites.

The candidate will analyze temporal change of remotely sensed spectral diversity, i.e. diversity of spectra captured by spaceborne satellite sensors such as MODIS or SENTINEL. The practical goal is to link this spectral diversity with locally measured taxonomic diversity (and to test the so called “spectral variability hypothesis”), and to investigate if the remotely sensed biodiversity change can be used as a proxy for temporal change of taxonomic diversity.

How to apply?

Details, requirements, salary, and application instructions are here. Application deadline is 4th of February 2024.