Ana Filipa Ferreira

The new Biosphere Reserves Institute (BRI) at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE) represents a pioneering effort to promote sustainable development and transformation. As an UNESCO Category 2 Institute, the BRI serves as an international think tank that advances science, technology and innovation in UNESCO Biosphere Reserves.

Research about biosphere reserves’ management effectiveness can contribute to better understanding of the existing gap between the biosphere reserve concept and its implementation. However, there is a limited understanding about where and how research about biosphere reserves’ management effectiveness has been conducted, what topics are investigated, and which are the main findings. This study addresses these gaps in the field, building on a systematic literature review of scientific papers. To this end, we investigated characteristics of publications, scope, status and location of biosphere reserves, research methods and management effectiveness. The results indicate that research is conceptually and methodologically diverse, but unevenly distributed. Three groups of papers associated with different goals of biosphere reserves were identified: capacity building, biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. In general, each group is associated with different methodological approaches and different regions of the world. The results indicate the importance of scale dynamics and trade-offs between goals, which are advanced as important leverage points for the success of biosphere reserves. Building on the gaps identified in the literature, a research agenda is proposed, focusing on the need to investigate mechanisms for holistic research, outcomes and trade-offs, transformations for social-ecological fit and institutions for integrated management across scales.

Biosphere reserves aim to reconciliate social and economic development with biodiversity conservation through complex spatial and governance arrangements. However, there is a generalized lack of information about how biosphere reserves are being managed and governed, and at what point their goals are being achieved, which limits a better understanding of the factors influencing biosphere reserve management effectiveness. Building on a systematic review of existing empirical studies, we developed a framework that identifies the main features related to biosphere reserve management effectiveness. We identified four main categories—context, inputs, process and outcomes—and 53 sub-categories, which interact at different scales and shape biosphere reserve effectiveness. We found that the capacity of biosphere reserves to achieve their goals is not only related to the way they are managed/governed, or to the inputs invested, but to many social and ecological contextual factors. We also identified benefits and impacts that were associated to biosphere reserves around the world. Comparing to other social–ecological system frameworks, ours provides a more inclusive approach, since it integrates the findings of studies with different research perspectives, considers a plurality of values attributed to natural resources, and the social–ecological system’s scales dynamics.

The sea lamprey is an anadromous species that migrates twice during its life cycle between freshwater and seawater. Microphagous larvae generally spend 4–5 years burrowed in the substrate of rivers and streams before undergoing metamorphosis that ends with the beginning of the juvenile trophic migration. Once metamorphosis is complete, sea lamprey juvenile downstream migrants are fully tolerant to seawater salinity. Pollution resulting from industrial effluents may disturb the seawater acclimatization causing oxidative damage, and ultimately may lead to a decrease of sea lamprey population. The aim of this study was to compare salt acclimation of sea lamprey juveniles captured in river basins with different levels of aquatic pollution, using mitochondrial glutathione (GSH) and malondialdehyde (MDA) of gills and liver as markers of physiological stress and cell damage. The results showed that juveniles from the Lima basin exhibited the highest levels of mitochondrial MDA in gills, even though significant changes in the stress markers of mitochondrial gills of all animals subject to salt acclimation were not detected. In addition, an increase in the oxidative damage of hepatic mitochondria of macrophthalmia from the Vouga basin suggests the occurrence of metabolic failures with the potential to disturb the capacity to adaptation to the marine environment.

This study hypothesizes the existence of three groups of sea lamprey Petromyzon marinus L. in Portugal (North/Central group, Tagus group, and Guadiana group), possibly promoted by seabed topography isolation during the oceanic phase of the life cycle. Within this context, our purpose was to analyze the existence of a stock structure on sea lamprey populations sampled in the major Portuguese river basins using both morphological characters and heart tissue fatty acid signature. In both cases, the multiple discriminant analysis revealed statistically significant differences among groups, and the overall corrected classification rate estimated from cross-validation procedure was particularly high for the cardiac muscle fatty acid profiles (i.e. 83.8%). Morphometric characters were much more useful than meristic ones to discriminate stocks, and the most important variables for group differentiation were eye length, second dorsal fin length and branchial length. Fatty acid analysis showed that all lampreys from the southern Guadiana group were correctly classified and not mixing with individuals from any other group, reflecting a typical heart fatty acid signature. Our results revealed that 89.5% and 72.2% of the individuals from the Tagus and North/Central groups, respectively, were also correctly classified, despite some degree of overlap between individuals from these groups. The fatty acids that contributed to the observed segregation were C16:0; C17:0; C18:1ω9; C20:3ω6 and C22:2ω6. Detected differences are probably related with environmental variables to which lampreys may have been exposed, which leaded to different patterns of gene expression. These results suggest the existence of three different sea lamprey stocks in Portugal, with implication in terms of management and conservation.

Spatial variability in streamflow characteristics is responsible for a large range of habitat variations to which fish are adapted through life‐cycle strategies and morphological adaptations. In this study, we compared the swimming performance and related morphology of two Iberian barbel populations from permanent and temporary rivers. The permanent river was characterised by its Atlantic influence with higher water availability and a more unstable and turbulent environment, contrasting with the lower discharge setting observed in the southern Mediterranean ecosystem during most of the hydrological year. Barbels from the permanent river exhibited a higher critical swimming speed (U_crit) associated with a more fusiform body shape, narrower head and caudal peduncle, lower body condition and longer and higher pectoral and dorsal fins, when compared with the population from the temporary watercourse. These results reflect a morphological response in a way to reduce hydrodynamic resistance and energy expenditure during locomotion that we hypothesise here to be related with the different hydrological regimes of the studied systems.