Biodiversity provides vital goods and services, such as pollination, food provision, carbon sequestration and water regulation that strengthen economic prosperity. While conservation planning for biodiversity is a well-established research field, our ability to plan for ecosystem service provision is dependent upon the development of a reliable framework for understanding how ecosystems provide services and useful indicators for quantifying the provision of these goods and services.
The aim of this project is to form the framework for a new automated tool (Ecosystem Service Evaluation Tool, EcoSET). The development of the EcoSET tool will entail obtaining data and developing algorithms for the following five ecosystem service values (pollination, cultural services, carbon storage and, soil erosion prevention). During this project, the potential for incorporating long-term environmental data and their use in providing a dynamic measure of the rate of the ecosystem responses to climate or anthropogenic change.
Research was originally undertaken as part of a VISTA project. Development of EcoSET has subsequently been progressed under our LIFE+ project, NaturEtrade.
