Search results for "ecosystem service"
showing 10 items of 209 documents
Impacts of forestry on boreal forests : An ecosystem services perspective
2017
Forests are widely recognized as major providers of ecosystem services, including timber, other forest products, recreation, regulation of water, soil and air quality, and climate change mitigation. Extensive tracts of boreal forests are actively managed for timber production, but actions aimed at increasing timber yields also affect other forest functions and services. Here, we present an overview of the environmental impacts of forest management from the perspective of ecosystem services. We show how prevailing forestry practices may have substantial but diverse effects on the various ecosystem services provided by boreal forests. Several aspects of these processes remain poorly known and…
Challenges of ecological restoration: Lessons from forests in northern Europe
2013
The alarming rate of ecosystem degradation has raised the need for ecological restoration throughout different biomes and continents. North European forests may appear as one of the least vulnerable ecosystems from a global perspective, since forest cover is not rapidly decreasing and many ecosystem services remain at high level. However, extensive areas of northern forests are heavily exploited and have lost a major part of their biodiversity value. There is a strong requirement to restore these areas towards a more natural condition in order to meet the targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Several northern countries are now taking up this challenge by restoring forest biodiv…
Conceptual and operational perspectives on ecosystem restoration options in the European Union and elsewhere
2015
Summary Egoh et al. (2014) prioritized areas for ecological restoration in the European Union (EU) so that Europe could cost-efficiently meet the globally agreed 15% restoration target. We identify three major deficiencies in their analysis, one conceptual and two operational, which compromise the conclusions of the prioritization. The conceptual flaw is neglect of both the magnitude of degradation and the magnitude of improvement of the ecosystem condition expected due to restoration. The first operational flaw is inclusion of inappropriately measured restoration costs into the analyses. The second is use of spatial units that are so large (10 × 10 km) that only a fraction of each unit cou…
A fungal perspective on conservation biology
2014
Hitherto fungi have rarely been considered in conservation biology, but this is changing as the field moves from addressing single species issues to an integrative ecosystem-based approach. The current emphasis on biodiversity as a provider of ecosystem services throws the spotlight on the vast diversity of fungi, their crucial roles in terrestrial ecosystems, and the benefits of considering fungi in concert with animals and plants. We reviewed the role of fungi in ecosystems and composed an overview of the current state of conservation of fungi. There are 5 areas in which fungi can be readily integrated into conservation: as providers of habitats and processes important for other organisms…
Mitigating forest biodiversity and ecosystem service losses in the era of bio-based economy
2018
Abstract Forests play a crucial role in the transition towards a bioeconomy by providing biomass to substitute for fossil-based materials and energy. However, a policy-policy conflict exists between the desire to increase the utilization of bio based renewable resources and the desire to protect and conserve biodiversity. Increasing forest harvest levels to meet the needs of the bioeconomy may conflict with biodiversity protection and ecosystem services provided by forests. Through an optimization framework, we examined trade-offs between increasing the extraction of timber resources, and the impacts on biodiversity and non-wood ecosystem services, and investigated possibilities to reconcil…
Disintegration of Italian rural landscapes to international environmental agreements
2015
In Italy, the first law that puts landscape and historical buildings under public control was implemented in 1922. While this represents a significant achievement for those times, for that law landscape essentially has an historical and aesthetic connotation, without any explicit reference to the components of flora, fauna and geology. Today, many protection policies and initiatives are still biased by the lack of reference to the intrinsic value that biodiversity and ecosystem services have for the maintenance of traditional landscapes, as well as for the survival of the human species. The priority accorded to historical and aesthetic values can lead to a lack of attention to the complex r…
Ecosystem processes are rarely included in tactical fisheries management
2015
Fish stock productivity, and thereby sensitivity to harvesting, depends on physical (e.g. ocean climate) and biological (e.g. prey availability, competition and predation) processes in the ecosystem. The combined impacts of such ecosystem processes and fisheries have lead to stock collapses across the world. While traditional fisheries management focuses on harvest rates and stock biomass, incorporating the impacts of such ecosystem processes are one of the main pillars of the ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EAFM). Although EAFM has been formally adopted widely since the 1990s, little is currently known to what extent ecosystem drivers of fish stock productivity are actually imp…
Designer ecosystems : A solution for the conservation-exploitation dilemma
2016
Increase in human population is accelerating the rate of land use change, biodiversity loss and habitat degradation, triggering a serious threat to life supporting ecosystem services. Existing strategies for biological conservation remain insufficient to achieve a sustainable human-nature relationship and this situation has fueled a debate on the conservation-exploitation dilemma. We need to devise novel strategies, in a mutually inclusive way, which can support biological conservation and secure economic development of deprived populations. Here we propose the use of designer ecosystems which can ensure ecological sustainability while providing ample and some new means of livelihood to loc…
Economics of mixed-species forestry with ecosystem services
2019
The Faustmann–Hartman setup is widely established for specifying the economics of forest values besides timber, but it is criticized as restrictive for capturing diversity values. We show that extending the model to cover diversity attributes, i.e., mixed species and internal heterogeneity within species, is not enough to overcome these restrictions. Additionally, it is necessary to extend forest harvesting regimes to cover thinning, continuous cover forestry, and the management of commercially useless trees. Restrictions in the Faustmann–Hartman setup are first shown analytically with optimized thinning but without tree size structures. The empirical significance of these findings is show…
LTSER platforms as a place-based transdisciplinary research infrastructure: learning landscape approach through evaluation
2019
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.…