What we do
From IAI CRN 2015
With partners and case-studies from across North and South America, we use an interdisciplinary approach to study the effects of functional biodiversity on ecosystem processes, ecosystem services and sustainability in the Americas. Our executive summary provides a general overview of our planned activities.
Contents |
Background and state of the art
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment represents the most widely accepted synthesis of our current knowledge on ecosystem services. Its main conclusions are that:
- Biodiversity is a driver of environmental change, not only a response variable!
- Changes in dominant species are the most crucial process.
- Biodiversity affects components of human well-being.
- Ecosystem services provision depends on the surface-area of ecosystems, not on the conservation of small parcels.
- The most serious threat to biodiversity is land-use change.
- The effects of biodiversity loss are disproportionately felt by the poor and leads to their social and economic marginalization (see ecosystem service conflicts).
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment also recognizes that both direct and indirect relations exist between biodiversity and ecosystem services. In our network we will deal with both, investigating indirect links through changes in ecosystem properties. We also follow the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in considering that ecosystem services are at the interface of natural and social sciences.
Main Goals
Our research aims to go further than the above state of the art by investigating how functional biodiversity contributes to ecosystem services (i.e. that not all species are equal) and how different social actors perceive and value ecosystem services, sometimes leading to ES conflicts (i.e. that not all people are equal).
Our main goals are:
- To construct a network of scientists addressing links between land use as a driver of global change, functional biodiversity shifts, and ecosystem processes and services in the Americas. To find out more, check out who we are.
- To develop the first comparison of the effects of land use on functional biodiversity and to establish how this in turn has the potential to modify ecosystem processes in systems under different degrees of climatic control. To find out more, you can visit our case-study sites.
- To establish links between functional diversity, ecosystem functioning and major ecosystem services perceived by different local and non-local stakeholders. To find out more, go to our page on the human dimension.
- To develop a conceptual framework and a set of empirical tools and recommendations, available to a wide community of scientists, para-scientist and land-managers, to be used as the basis for management decisions aimed to assess and optimize the ecosystem-service value of the land considering the interests of different stakeholders. To find out more, check out our thoughts on policy relevance.
Case-study sites
To achieve these goals, we will collect, analyze and interpret data from various land-use systems in North and South America. These are centred around:
- Toolik Field Station (tundra) in the Northern foothills of Alaska's Brooks range.
- The San Juan - La Selva Biological Corridor in Costa-Rica (rainforest).
- The forest of Reserva Ducke near Manaus in Brazilian Amazonia (part of the CTFS network).
- The forests of La Chonta (moist forest) and INPA (dry forest) in the lowlands of Bolivia.
- Chancani (arid Chaco forest) in the NW of Córdoba Province, Argentina.
Key concepts and methods
In relating land-use, functional biodiversity, ecosystem properties, ecosystem services and the people who benefit from them, we make use of a wide variety of concepts and methods. These are drawn from various scientific disciplines (including Ecology, Plant physiology, Land-use Science, Rural Sociology...) as well as action-research (in the Social Sciences). Some concepts are explictly interdisciplinary in focus (e.g. ecosystem services).
Our key concepts include:
- Land-use change
- Plant traits, and in particular the acquisition-conservation trade-off in plant nutrient economy (Wright et al., 2004).
- Plant functional diversity
- Ecological trade-offs
- Ecosystem properties
- Ecosystem services
- Social conflicts
- feedbacks(both within and between ecosystems and social systems).
- sustainability
- socio-ecological systems
More information on these concepts can be found by visiting their respective pages. How we use them is detailed in the following pages, with restricted access:
