Congruence between the prioritisation of conservation problems at the local and national scale: an evaluation by environmental scientists in Poland.

The anthropogenic pressure on the environment depends on the spatial scale. It is crucial to prioritise conservation actions at different spatial scales to be cost-efficient. Using horizon scanning with the Delphi technique, we asked what the most important conservation problems are in Poland at local and national scales. Twenty-six participants, PhD students, individually identified conservation issues important at the local and national scales. Each problem was then scored and classified into broader categories during the round discussions. Text mining, cross-sectional analyses, and frequency tests were used to compare the context, importance scores, and frequency of identified problems between the two scales, respectively. A total of 115 problems were identified at the local scale and 122 at the national scale. Among them, 30 problems were identical for both scales. Importance scores were higher for national than local problems; however, this resulted from different sets of problems identified at the two scales. Problems linked to urbanisation, education, and management were associated with the local scale. Problems related to policy, forestry, and consumerism were more frequent at the national scale. An efficient conservation policy should be built hierarchically (e.g. introducing adaptive governance), implementing solutions at a national scale with the flexibility to adjust for local differences and to address the most pressing issues.

Body Size in Males of the Ant Lasius niger (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) Along a Metal Pollution Gradient.

Environmental stress can lead to a decrease in the body size of insects. As social insects, ants have a complex caste system; each caste has its own morphological traits and functions in the colony, hence the effects of stress may manifest differentially among different ant castes. Here we investigated the body size of males of the common garden ant, Lasius niger L., 1758, living in a postmining area polluted mainly by Zn, Cd, and Pb. We examined if individual body size decreases with the pollution gradient. The ants were sampled from 39 wild colonies originating from 17 sites located along the metal pollution gradient; head width was used as the estimator of body size. We failed to show a significant correlation between pollution and male body size, indicating no direct effect of pollution on the body size of males of the investigated ant. However, we found a significant dependence with the colony of origin, which is in line with a previous study performed on this species in unpolluted sites. These results further strengthen a general conclusion that morphological traits in ants, such as body size or fluctuating asymmetry, are relatively invariable and stable across gradients of metal pollution.