0000000000172448
AUTHOR
Per Angelstam
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…
Using long-term ecosystem service and biodiversity data to study the impacts and adaptation options in response to climate change: insights from the global ILTER sites network
The International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network can coordinate ecological research to provide observations of the ecosystem changes, and their socio-economic impacts on human societies at different scales. In this paper we demonstrate the importance of the ILTER network in the study and monitoring of environmental changes at a global level. We give examples of how biodiversity and ecosystem service data can be used to study impacts and adaptation options in response to climate change. Analysis of the 107 recent publications from LTER networks representing 21 countries show that LTER studies are often local and heterogeneous. There are some ecosystem types, such as agricultur…
Occurrence of fire among boreal forest site types and climates can guide natural disturbance emulation for biodiversity conservation: a case study of uptake of evidence-based knowledge
Since 1993 Swedish forest policy states that production and environmental objectives are equally important. This triggered knowledge production about how to diversify forest management systems. For the dominating boreal forests evidence show that knowledge about the relative incidence of forest fire can be used to estimate the relative amount of different forest disturbance regimes that ought to be emulated in a particular landscape. Those regimes range from gap-phase dynamic on wet rich sites and humid climates where fire is absent or occurs seldom, via succession after infrequent stand-replacing fires to multiple cohorts of Scots pine where fire occurs often. The conceptual ASIO-model, af…