Protected areas are one of the most common strategies for wildlife conservation worldwide. However, their effectiveness is rarely evaluated. In Europe, after the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a restrictive sanitary regulation prohibited the abandonment of dead livestock in extensive farming in the field, which led to negative consequences for scavengers. As an attempt to mitigate this negative impact, a new regulation was approved to allow farmers to leave extensive livestock...

Mediterranean temporary ponds on Doñana’s aeolian sands form an extensive system of small dynamic water bodies, dependent on precipitation and groundwater, of considerable importance for biodiversity conservation. Different areas of the aeolian sands have received different levels of environmental protection since 1969, and this has influenced the degree of conservation and the flooding dynamic of these temporary surface waters. The Landsat series of satellite images from 1985 to 2014 was...

One paradoxical finding in some mammals is the presence of male–male intrasexual competition in the absence of sexual size dimorphism. It has been a major goal of evolutionary biologists for over a century to understand why some species in which large males can monopolize multiple mates while excluding smaller competitors, exhibit little or no sexual dimorphism. In this paper three of the main hypotheses that have been proposed to explain this conundrum are examined using as study case...

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) is an iconic large carnivore that has increasingly been recognized as an apex predator with intrinsic value and a keystone species. However, wolves have also long represented a primary source of human–carnivore conflict, which has led to long-term persecution of wolves, resulting in a significant decrease in their numbers, genetic diversity and gene flow between populations. This review serves as an analytical summary of the main findings from wolf...

Planetary-scale changes due to human activities involve abrupt environmental alterations, which can particularly involve dramatic consequences in the aquatic systems because of the low dispersal ability of many species living there. In this study the physiological stress responses against non-lethal levels of common stressors for amphibian larvae, the most threatened group in the world, were evaluated.