0000000000172447
AUTHOR
Marine Elbakidze
Barriers and Bridges for Landscape Stewardship and Knowledge Production to Sustain Functional Green Infrastructures
Sustainable landscapes and regions require both stewardship and management to sustain the composition, structure and function of ecosystems as a base for delivering human benefits. This complex is captured by the topic of ecosystem services. To deliver these, the concept green (or blue) infrastructure emerged as a tool for spatial planning of networks of natural and semi-natural areas. Such planning requires evidence-based knowledge about both ecological and social systems. For ecosystems, states and trends need be monitored, and improved knowledge must be developed about ecological tipping points for assessment of sustainability, as well as measures for conservation, management and restora…
LTSER platforms as a place-based transdisciplinary research infrastructure: learning landscape approach through evaluation
Context: Place-based transdisciplinary research involves multiple academic disciplines and non-academic actors. Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) platform is one concept with ~ 80 initiatives globally. Objectives: As an exercise in learning through evaluation we audited (1) the siting, construction and maintenance of individual LTSER platforms, and (2) them as a distributed infrastructure for place-based transdisciplinary research with focus on the European continent. Methods: First, we defined a normative model for ideal performance at both platform and network levels. Second, four surveys were sent out to the 67 self-reported LTSER platforms officially listed at the end of 2016.…
Towards Functional Green Infrastructure in the Baltic Sea Region: Knowledge Production and Learning Across Borders
Natural capital is the foundation for delivering multiple ecosystem services important for biodiversity and human wellbeing. Functional green infrastructure (GI) is one of the land management approaches to secure the sustainable use of natural capital. This chapter presents the outcomes of a integrative research for knowledge production and learning towards functional GI in the Baltic Sea Region. The overview of attempts to develop functional GI in Sweden, Latvia, Belarus and the Russian Federation, the countries with different contexts, illustrates similar sets of challenges in the maintenance of GI functions for both biodiversity and human wellbeing. The main challenges are (1) sustaining…
How to reconcile wood production and biodiversity conservation? The Pan-European boreal forest history gradient as an "experiment".
There are currently competing demands on Europe's forests and the finite resources and services that they can offer. Forestry intensification that aims at mitigating climate change and biodiversity conservation is one example. Whether or not these two objectives compete can be evaluated by comparative studies of forest landscapes with different histories. We test the hypothesis that indicators of wood production and biodiversity conservation are inversely related in a gradient of long to short forestry intensification histories. Forest management data containing stand age, volume and tree species were used to model the opportunity for wood production and biodiversity conservation in five no…