Background: Linear transportation infrastructures (roads, railways, oil and gas pipelines, powerlines and waterways) generate well documented fragmenting effects on species habitats. However, the potential of verges of linear transportation infrastructures (road and railway embankments, strips of grass under power lines or above buried pipelines, or waterway banks) as habitat or corridor for biodiversity, remains controversial. In a context of constant loss of natural habitats, the opportunities of anthropogenic areas for compensating the loss of biodiversity they generated have to be considered. This paper is the first synthesis of evidence addressing this topic for vertebrates (mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles) in temperate ecosystems.Methods: We conducted a systematic literature survey using two online publication databases, three search engines, specialist websites, and by sending a call for literature to subject experts. We successively screened the articles for relevance on titles, abstracts and full texts using criteria detailed in an a priori protocol. We then used six specific questions to categorize the retained studies and to critically appraise them. These questions encompassed the potential of verges as habitats and corridors for vertebrates, and the effects of landscape and management on these potentialities. We critically appraised all studies to assess their risk of bias and created a database of the studies with low and medium risk of bias. We synthesized results for each specific question in narrative syntheses. Finally, studies that met meta-analysis requirements were used for quantitative syntheses.Results: Our initial searches identified 83,565 documents. After critical appraisal, we retained 119 documents that reported 128 studies. Most studies were conducted in Europe (49%) and in the United States of America (22%), and were about mammals (61%) and birds (20%). Results from the narrative synthesis and meta-analyses converged and revealed that the potential of linear transportation infrastructures verges to constitute a habitat for vertebrate species varies according to the infrastructure and the biological group considered. Especially, highway verges may be a refuge for small mammals but seems detrimental to birds. The potential also varied depending on the landscape considered, with urbanisation being related to lower biodiversity hosted by verges. We found a wide variety of verge management practices with few studies on each practice, which prevented us from drawing general conclusions. Likewise, we found too few studies assessing the corridor potential of verges to be able to fully conclude although this potential seems to exist. We did not find any study assessing the effect of landscape context or management on the role of corridor of verges.Conclusions: We identified a major knowledge gap regarding the potential of linear transportation infrastructure verges as corridors for vertebrates, and when they exist studies rarely directly measured movements on verges. We thus encourage more research on this topic and the development of protocols that enable direct measures of vertebrate movements. The effect of management practices on the role of habitat of verges also deserves further investigations, and research efforts should be coordinated to focus on one specific practice (e.g. vegetation management).

Background: Tropical coral reefs cover only ca. 0.1% of the Earth’s surface but harbour exceptional marine biodiversity and provide vital ecosystem services to millions of people living nearby. They are currently threatened by global (e.g. climate change) and local (e.g. chemical pollution) stressors that interact in multiple ways. While global stressors cannot be mitigated by local actions alone, local stressors can be reduced through ecosystem management. Here, we aimed to systematically review experimental studies assessing the toxicity of chemical pollutants to tropical reef-building corals to generate accessible and usable knowledge and data that can be used to calculate measurement endpoints in ecological risk assessment. From the quantitative estimates of effects, we determined toxicity thresholds as the highest exposures tested at which no statistically significant adverse effects were observed, and we compared them to regulatory predicted no effect concentrations for the protection of marine organisms, to assess whether these reference values are indeed protective of corals. Methods: The evidence was taken from a systematic map of the impacts of chemicals arising from human activity on tropical reef-building corals published in 2021. All studies in the map database corresponding to the knowledge cluster “Evidence on the ecotoxicological effects of chemicals on corals” were selected. To identify subsequently published literature, the search was updated using a subset of the search string used for the systematic map. Titles, abstracts and full-texts were screened according to the criteria defining the selected cluster of the map. Because the eligibility criteria for the systematic review are narrower than the criteria used to define the cluster in the systematic map, additional screening was performed. Studies included were critically appraised and each study was rated as low, unclear, medium, or high risk of bias. Data were extracted from the studies and synthesised according to a strategy dependent on the type of exposure and outcome. Review findings: The systematic review reports the known effects of chemical exposures on corals from 847 studies corresponding to 181 articles. A total of 697 studies (161 articles) were included in the quantitative synthesis and 150 studies (50 articles) in the narrative synthesis of the findings. The quantitative synthesis records the effects of 2706 exposure concentrations-durations of 164 chemicals or mixtures of chemicals, and identifies 105 toxicity thresholds corresponding to 56 chemicals or mixtures of chemicals. When toxicity thresholds were compared to reference values set for the protection of marine organisms by environmental agencies, the reference values appear to be protective of corals for all but three chemicals assessed: the metal copper and the pesticides diuron and irgarol 1051. Conclusions: This open-access database of known ecotoxicological effects of chemical exposures on corals can assist managers in the ecological risk assessment of chemicals, by allowing easy determination of various ecotoxicological thresholds. Several limitations of the toxicity tests synthesised here were noted (in particular the lack of measurement of effective concentrations for more than half of the studies). Overall, most of the currently available data on coral toxicity should be replicated independently and extended to corals from less studied geographical regions and functional groups.

In central Africa, most of the timber species require high light at the seedling stage for survival and growth. Forest managers face a regeneration shortage of these light-demanding timber species. To achieve long-term sustainability, there is a need for enrichment methods combining low cost and high species performance. The aim of this study was to assess the performance of Pericopsis elata seedlings in enriched logging gaps in Cameroon. Over five years; the survival and size of each seedling was monitored in 27 logging gaps that were either left without maintenance or cleared. Gaps were relatively small with an average total area of 155 m². We found that planted seedlings of P. elata performed well in logging gaps. Even without any maintenance 61% of the planted seedlings survived after five years with an average annual diameter increment of 0.28 cm. P. elata appeared to be a good candidate species for enrichment in logging gaps. We demonstrated that the seedlings of P. elata tolerated a wide range of soil conditions but that their performance was strongly influenced by light availability (gap clearance), suggesting potentially improved performance of P. elata in high light environments such as in plantation or larger gaps.