Riparian Ecological Infrastructures are networks of natural and semi-natural riparian areas located in human-dominated landscapes, crucial in supporting processes that directly or indirectly benefit humans or enhance social welfare. In this study, we developed a novel multimetric index, termed Habitat Ecological Infrastructure’s Diversity Index (HEIDI), to quantify the potential of Riparian Ecological Infrastructures in supporting biodiversity, and related ecosystem services, in three managed landscapes: Intensive Agriculture, Extensive Agriculture, and Forest Production. Metrics describing the structure, composition, and management of riparian vegetation and associated habitats were used to derive the potential of Riparian Ecological Infrastructures in supporting three distinct biological dispersal groups: short-range dispersers (ants), medium-range dispersers (pollinators), and long-range dispersers (birds, bats, and non-flying small mammals). The composition of floristic resources, assessed by identifying trees and shrubs at the species and genus level, and herbaceous plants at the family level, was used as a proxy to evaluate the potential of Riparian Ecological Infrastructures in promoting seed dispersal and pollination ecosystem services provided by the three biological communities. Our research evidenced that Riparian Ecological Infrastructures located in the Forest Production and Intensive Agriculture landscapes exhibited the highest and lowest potential for biodiversity-related ecosystem services, respectively. The Forest Production landscape revealed higher suitability of forage resources for short- and medium-range dispersers and a higher landscape coverage by Riparian Ecological Infrastructures, resulting in more potential to create ecological corridors and to provide ecosystem services. The Riparian Ecological Infrastructures located in the Extensive Agriculture landscape seemed to be particularly relevant for supporting long-ranges dispersers, despite providing less habitat for the biological communities. Land-use systems in the proximity of Riparian Ecological Infrastructures should be sustainably managed to promote riparian vegetation composition and structural quality, as well as the riparian width, safeguarding biodiversity, and the sustainable provision of biodiversity-related ecosystem services.

Freshwater ecosystems are some of the most endangered environments in the world, being affected at multiple scales by the surrounding landscape and human activities therein. Effective research, conservation and management of these ecosystems requires integrating environmental and landscape data with hierarchic river networks by means of summarisation and synthesis of information for large and comprehensive areas at different scales (e.g. basin, sub‐basin, upstream drainage area). The dendritic nature of river networks, the need to tackle multiple scales and the ever‐growing sources of digital information (e.g. temperature or land use data grids) have increasingly led to hardly manageable processing time and stringent hardware requirements when integrating and working with this information. Here we present the River Network Toolkit (RivTool), a software that uses only tabular data to derive and calculate new information at multiple scales for riverine landscapes. It uses data from linear hierarchical river networks and the environmental/landscape data from their respective drainage areas. The software allows the acquisition of: 1) information that characterises river networks based on its topographic nature; 2) data obtained via mathematical calculations that account for the hierarchical and network nature of these systems; and 3) output information using different spatial data sources (e.g. climatic, land use, topologic) that result from up and downstream summarisations. This user‐friendly software considers two units of analysis (segment and sub‐basin) and is time effective even with large datasets. RivTool facilitates and reduces the time required for extracting information for freshwater ecosystems, and may thus contribute to increase scientific productivity, efficiency and accurateness when generating new or improving existing knowledge on large‐scale patterns and processes in river networks.

The connectivity of riparian forests can be used as a proxy for the capacity of riparian zones to provide ecological functions, goods and services. In this study, we aim to test the potential of the freely available Copernicus “Riparian Zones” dataset to characterize the connectivity of riparian forests located in two European bioclimatic regions—the Mediterranean and the Central Baltic hydroregions—when subject to a gradient of human disturbance characterized by land-use/land-cover and hydromorphological pressures. We extracted riparian patches using the Copernicus “Actual Riparian Zone” (ARZ) layer and calculated connectivity using the Integral Index of Connectivity (IIC). We then compared the results with a “Manual Riparian Zone” (MRZ) layer, produced by manually digitizing riparian vegetation patches over a very high-resolution World Imagery layer. Our research evidenced reduced forest connectivity in both hydroregions, with the exception of Least Disturbed sites in the Central Baltic hydroregion. The ARZ layer exhibited overall suitability to assess the connectivity of riparian forests in the Central Baltic hydroregion, while the Mediterranean hydroregion displayed a consistent pattern of connectivity overestimation in all levels of human disturbance. To address this, we recommend some improvements in the spatial resolution and thematic accuracy of the Copernicus ARZ layer.

We aimed at assessing the role of ecological infrastructures (EI) in promoting ant biodiversity in floodplain Mediterranean agricultural crops. We examined and compared ant communities at the interface between EI (remnant vegetation patches) and adjoining agricultural matrix (maize, rice, others) in irrigated farmland. The study was conducted in 2019, in two agricultural landscapes in the valleys of the rivers Tagus and Sorraia, Central Portugal. We used the Akaike information criterion for model selection and to distinguish among a set of possible models describing the relationship between: the ant richness in the agricultural matrix and drivers associated with the surrounding landscape and crop type; the ant richness in EI and the habitat quality of EI patches, the characteristics of the surrounding landscape, and the presence of invasive ant species. We found that: EI patches supported a higher ant diversity and an overall specialized ant community, distinctive from the agricultural matrix; location but not vegetation physiognomy influenced ant diversity; ant richness within the agricultural matrix decreased with the distance to the EI, and that this relationship was influenced by the crop type; and that ant richness in the EI was associated with the absence of the invasive Argentine ant and the area of terrestrial EI in the surrounding landscape.