Andrea Dalpasso

Provides a unified interface to download, harmonise and extract a wide range of environmental and socio-economic variables from established open data web services (such as 'WorldClim' , 'CHELSA' and 'Bio-ORACLE' , among others) for use in macroecology and biogeography. The package handles spatial subsetting to a study area, reprojection to a common coordinate reference system, and extraction of values at sampling points, so that predictors from heterogeneous sources can be assembled within a single reproducible workflow. Helper functions for collinearity checking and variable exploration are also included.

Agricultural expansion and intensification are driving amphibian and reptile declines worldwide. However, sustainably managed agroecosystems can support a high diversity of herpetofauna, which play a key role in pest control, reducing crop damage. Therefore, integrating herpetofauna conservation into agricultural policies is vital for enhancing human well‐being, but it remains largely overlooked. High nature value farmlands (HNVFs) offer a promising framework for conserving herpetofauna outside protected areas; however, the lack of a standardized protocol for HNVF identification can complicate agroecosystem conservation prioritization. We used amphibian and reptile presence data to assess the environmental and climatic factors shaping amphibian and reptile diversity across European agroecosystems and identify HNVFs at large (10 km) and small (2 km) spatial scales. We compared two approaches for HNVF identification, species richness, and irreplaceability and tested whether these areas are protected by the current conservation framework. Coverage of both groups was promoted by heterogenous agroecosystems with natural elements (forest patches, hedgerows, and water bodies), whereas agricultural cover showed negative effects. HNVF identification was generally consistent among the different spatial scales. HNVFs identified through irreplaceability placed greater emphasis on agricultural areas hosting farmland‐associated species, highlighting that irreplaceability provides a more robust approach to HNVF identification. Only a small fraction of HNVFs was protected by the existing European Natura 2000 network, emphasizing the need for improved agrienvironmental schemes to ensure herpetofauna conservation.

In the last century, a plethora of species have shown rapid phenological changes in response to climate change. Among animals, amphibians exhibit some of the greatest responses since their activity strongly depends on temperature and rainfall regimes. These shifts in phenology can have negative consequences for amphibian fitness. Thus, understanding phenological changes in amphibians is pivotal to design conservation actions to mitigate climate change effects. We used data on Common Spadefoot Toad (Pelobates fuscus) reproductive migration to wetlands over a period of 8 years in Italy to (i) identify the factors related to breeding migrations, (ii) assess potential phenological shifts in the breeding period, and (iii) determine which climatic factors are related to the observed phenological shifts. Our results showed that toads migrate to spawning sites preferably in early spring, on rainy days with temperatures of 9–14 °C, and with high humidity. Furthermore, despite an increase in average temperature across the study period, we observed a delay in the start of breeding migrations of 12.4 days over 8 years. This counterintuitive pattern was the result of a succession of hot and dry years that occurred in the study area, highlighting that for ephemeral pond breeders, precipitation could have a larger impact than temperature on phenology. Our results belie the strong presumption that climate change will shift amphibian phenology toward an earlier breeding migration and underline the importance of closely investigating the environmental factors related to species phenology.

Aim: Understanding which factors determine the variation in population size across space and time is crucial to plan sound conservation interventions. Amphibians are often characterized by large demographic changes, therefore a better understanding of factors driving these changes could help mitigate their global crisis. We investigated drivers of abundance dynamics of two similar frog species to understand why they met different fates in the same study area.Location: Northern Italy.Methods: In seven different years between 2004 and 2020, we performed repeated counts of egg masses of two similar frog species, the agile frog (Rana dalmatina) and the Italian agile frog (Rana latastei), in 31 wetlands, and used Bayesian models to estimate the relationships between frog abundance and candidate drivers acting at the scale of (i) site: wetland surface, shading percentage and the presence of the invasive red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii); (ii) landscape: forest cover around wetlands; (iii) climate: yearly precipitation and (iv) spatially structured population (SSP): clutch incidence of the focal species and crayfish incidence in the surrounding landscape.Results: The two species showed sharp differences in population size and trends: R. dalmatina was abundant and showed a stable trend throughout the entire study period; R. latastei showed low abundance in the first years and then almost disappeared. The abundance of R. dalmatina was positively related to forest cover, shading, wetland area and precipitation, while negatively related to the occurrence of invasive crayfish at both local and SSP level. R. latastei abundance increased with wetland area and precipitation, while models were not able to detect relationships with other factors.Main conclusions: The high sensitivity to drought and demographic stochasticity could have contributed to the quasi‐extinction of R. latastei in the study area, highlighting that similar species can meet different fates even under the same environmental conditions.