ELENA BENNETT
Professor, Department of Natural Resource Sciences and McGill School of Environment, McGill University
DIRECTOR · CO-APPLICANT, LANDSCAPE 2 · COLLABORATOR, THEMES 1-3 · CO-LEADER, SYNTHESIS TEAM · BOARD OF DIRECTORS · SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY COMMITTEE
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If you picture the iconic Canadian landscape, you might have in your mind an expanse of productive farmland, maybe with a red barn or a farmhouse with a porch swing, a broad swath of forest, a northern peatland, or an ocean coastline. I am driven by my desire to protect those iconic, but often overlooked, working landscapes. I believe that we can better protect these places by ensuring that they provide food (or timber, peat, energy, fish, etc.) as well as the many other things that people get from these working landscapes. Biodiversity. Places to recreate. Flood control. Connection to history and a sense of place. These ecosystem services are crucial to us all, and protecting farmland is the only way to ensure their provision long into the future. When we focus solely on the efficient production of a single service in working landscapes, we often unknowingly or accidentally cause declines in other, equally important, ecosystem services. Unfortunately, we currently lack the tools needed to make decisions about agricultural landscape management that consider multiple services. To successfully manage multiple ecosystem services, communities need reliable information and effective tools to evaluate how physical structure of the landscape, biological interactions on the landscape, and human decisions about the landscape affect the provision of these services. My students and I seek to produce tools that link landscapes, biodiversity, and ecosystem services to improve decision-making about ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. We use this framework to build practical decision-support tools and work with communities to use and refine these tools as they grapple with the challenges of preserving our iconic landscapes in the face of local, regional, and global change.
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EXPERTISE
Ecosystem services, social-ecological systems, resilience
Ecosystem services, social-ecological systems, resilience