Theme 3: Monitoring

OVERVIEW

Our overarching goal is to develop local and regional monitoring guidelines of ecosystem services across landscapes using a set of essential variables and monitoring designs that will allow comparison across landscapes.

CHALLENGES FACING MONITORING

Need to develop multiscale monitoring guidelines of biodiversity and ecosystem services change.
Need to assess potential temporal mismatched and non-linear responses of ecological processes to social pressures and global changes.

Need to combine data from different spatial and temporal resolution to develop effective monitoring guidelines.
Need to account explicitly for time lags and feedback effects between ecological processes and the ecosystem services that they provide.

KEY CONCEPTS

Spatial Ecological Network Models
Socio-Economic context
Multiscale Analyses

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

Identify networks of key services and drivers using ecological network indicators
Determine how to monitor ecosystem network composition and configuration,
Determine the spatial weighting of important ecosystem services according to the local and regional landscape context
Perform sensitivity analyses to assess the cascading effects of losing/gaining key nodes and links in the ResNet landscapes
Identify high risk areas for biodiversity and ecosystem services.

EXPECTED OUTCOMES
We will propose a network framework to monitor ecosystem services that will allow us to determine the areas/landscapes with high risk of loss of ecosystem services accounting explicitly for uncertainty due to social pressures and global changes. We will provide a prototype of a dashboard for the national monitoring of ecosystem services.