Synthesis

OVERVIEW

The Synthesis Team will bear the responsibility for ensuring that the success of landscapes and themes is brought to a larger scale, including:

Developing standard protocols for data collection that work across landscapes (e.g., for indicators used, resolution of data collected, and other methods)
Methodological development to ensure that landscapes and themes are advancing along the frontiers of ES science
Testing and refining ESON-C for all working landscapes of Canada (beyond the six ResNet focal landscapes)

While ecosystem services connect people and nature and provide a common language to bridge disparate areas of inquiry, the rigor and standardization of ecosystem services remains a work in progress, and the policy relevance of ecosystem services is still finding itself within a governance landscape that largely pre-dates ecosystem service language and concepts. This theme focuses on maximizing the the rigour and relevance of ecosystem service approaches in the real world by connecting academia, government and the not-for-profit and private sectors with awareness of both academic and non-academic priorities, programs, and policies to best return network innovations and opportunities to the governance landscape where they can have greatest impact.

This theme will also work on building and exploring novel scenario development methods and road-testing the monitoring and dashboard system for ESON-C.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

Development of data protocols for landscapes and themes, including development of indicators and theory around indicators used to assess ecosystem services and natural capital
Build and explore novel scenario development methods

Build and road-test a monitoring and dashboard system for ESON-C
Assess successes and failures of ResNet and suggest steps forward for ResNet, the Canadian ecosystem service community, and the international community interested in translational ecology for improved ES management in working landscapes

KEY CONCEPTS

Ecosystem service indicators
Scenario development
Scale-agnostic ecosystem service modelling

EXPECTED OUTCOMES

Data protocols to be used in ResNet landscapes and themes, including a core set of ecosystem services and natural capital indicators to be used widely across the network
Advanced knowledge on indicators for assessing ecosystem services and natural capital in working landscapes
A novel scenario development method and a user-friendly toolkit that could be used by others to employ our scenario development method
A framework for a monitoring system for ecosystem services and natural capital across Canada, including new knowledge about choosing appropriate indicators, how to measure those indicators (methods, scale), and how to incorporate knowledge and data about those indicators into decision-making at multiple scales
An assessment of ResNet itself and thoughts about how to move forward as a community at the end of our NSERC funding.