Chapter Unraveling Stakeholders’ Discourses Regarding Sustainable Development and Biodiversity Conservation in Greece

Pharmacolog

Investigating the barriers to adopting a 'human-in-nature' view in Greek biodiversity conservation

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Key criteria for developing ecosystem service indicators to inform decision making

Decision makers are increasingly interested in information from ecosystem services (ES) assessments. Scientists have for long recognised the importance of selecting appropriate indicators. Yet, while the amount and variety of indicators developed by scientists seems to increase continuously, the extent to which the indicators truly inform decision makers is often unknown and questioned. In this viewpoint paper, we reflect and provide guidance on how to develop appropriate ES indicators for informing decision making, building on scientific literature and practical experience collected from researchers involved in seven case studies. We synthesized 16 criteria for ES indicator selection and organized them according to the widely used categories of credibility, salience, legitimacy (CSL). We propose to consider additional criteria related to feasibility (F), as CSL criteria alone often seem to produce indicators which are unachievable in practice. Considering CSL & F together requires a combination of scientific knowledge, communication skills, policy and governance insights and on-field experience. We present a checklist to evaluate CSL & F of your ES indicators. This checklist helps to detect and mitigate critical shortcomings in an early phase of the development process, and aids the development of effective indicators to inform actual policy decisions

Satellite Sensor Requirements for Monitoring Essential Biodiversity Variables of Coastal Ecosystems

The biodiversity and high productivity of coastal terrestrial and aquatic habitats are the foundation for important benefits to human societies around the world. These globally distributed habitats need frequent and broad systematic assessments, but field surveys only cover a small fraction of these areas. Satellite-based sensors can repeatedly record the visible and near-infrared reflectance spectra that contain the absorption, scattering, and fluorescence signatures of functional phytoplankton groups, colored dissolved matter, and particulate matter near the surface ocean, and of biologically structured habitats (floating and emergent vegetation, benthic habitats like coral, seagrass, and algae). These measures can be incorporated into Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), including the distribution, abundance, and traits of groups of species populations, and used to evaluate habitat fragmentation. However, current and planned satellites are not designed to observe the EBVs that change rapidly with extreme tides, salinity, temperatures, storms, pollution, or physical habitat destruction over scales relevant to human activity. Making these observations requires a new generation of satellite sensors able to sample with these combined characteristics: (1) spatial resolution on the order of 30 to 100-m pixels or smaller; (2) spectral resolution on the order of 5 nm in the visible and 10 nm in the short-wave infrared spectrum (or at least two or more bands at 1,030, 1,240, 1,630, 2,125, and/or 2,260 nm) for atmospheric correction and aquatic and vegetation assessments; (3) radiometric quality with signal to noise ratios (SNR) above 800 (relative to signal levels typical of the open ocean), 14-bit digitization, absolute radiometric calibratio

Satellite sensor requirements for monitoring essential biodiversity variables of coastal ecosystems

© The Author(s), 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Ecological Applications 28 (2018): 749-760, doi: 10.1002/eap.1682.The biodiversity and high productivity of coastal terrestrial and aquatic habitats are the foundation for important benefits to human societies around the world. These globally distributed habitats need frequent and broad systematic assessments, but field surveys only cover a small fraction of these areas. Satellite‐based sensors can repeatedly record the visible and near‐infrared reflectance spectra that contain the absorption, scattering, and fluorescence signatures of functional phytoplankton groups, colored dissolved matter, and particulate matter near the surface ocean, and of biologically structured habitats (floating and emergent vegetation, benthic habitats like coral, seagrass, and algae). These measures can be incorporated into Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), including the distribution, abundance, and traits of groups of species populations, and used to evaluate habitat fragmentation. However, current and planned satellites are not designed to observe the EBVs that change rapidly with extreme tides, salinity, temperatures, storms, pollution, or physical habitat destruction over scales relevant to human activity. Making these observations requires a new generation of satellite sensors able to sample with these combined characteristics: (1) spatial resolution on the order of 30 to 100‐m pixels or smaller; (2) spectral resolution on the order of 5 nm in the visible and 10 nm in the short‐wave infrared spectrum (or at least two or more bands at 1,030, 1,240, 1,630, 2,125, and/or 2,260 nm) for atmospheric correction and aquatic and vegetation assessments; (3) radiometric quality with signal to noise ratios (SNR) above 800 (relative to signal levels typical of the open ocean), 14‐bit digitization, absolute radiometric calibration <2%, relative calibration of 0.2%, polarization sensitivity <1%, high radiometric stability and linearity, and operations designed to minimize sunglint; and (4) temporal resolution of hours to days. We refer to these combined specifications as H4 imaging. Enabling H4 imaging is vital for the conservation and management of global biodiversity and ecosystem services, including food provisioning and water security. An agile satellite in a 3‐d repeat low‐Earth orbit could sample 30‐km swath images of several hundred coastal habitats daily. Nine H4 satellites would provide weekly coverage of global coastal zones. Such satellite constellations are now feasible and are used in various applications.National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Grant Numbers: NNX16AQ34G, NNX14AR62A; National Ocean Partnership Program; NOAA US Integrated Ocean Observing System/IOOS Program Office; Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management Ecosystem Studies program (BOEM) Grant Number: MC15AC0000

Chapter Unraveling Stakeholders’ Discourses Regarding Sustainable Development and Biodiversity Conservation in Greece

Pharmacolog

Adding up the Benefits - A Bundle of Values

International audienceMuch of our early work into modeling ecosystem services has focused on improving our understanding of the value of single services coming out of individual ecosystems. The real world is more complex, with many ecosystems in close proximity, each generating multiple benefits, but also interacting with each other, both ecologically and in terms of the social and economic benefit

Mapping the global distribution of locally-generated marine ecosystem services: The case of the West and Central Pacific Ocean tuna fisheries

Ecosystem service (ES) maps are instrumental for the assessment and communication of the costs and benefits of human-nature interactions. Yet, despite the increased understanding that we live a globalized tele-coupled world where such interactions extend globally, ES maps are usually place-based and fail to depict the global flows of locally produced ES. We aim to shift the way ES maps are developed by bringing global value chains into ES assessments. We propose and apply a conceptual framework that integrates ES provision principles, with value chain analysis and human well-being assessment methods, while considering the spatial dimension of these components in ES mapping. We apply this framework to the case of seafood provision from purse seine tuna fishery in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean. The ES maps produced demonstrate the flow of a marine ES to a series of global beneficiaries via different trade and mobility pathways. We identify three types of flows - one to one, closed loop and open loop. We emphasize the need to consider a series of intermediate beneficiaries in ES mapping despite the lack of data. We highlight the need for a shift in ES mapping, to better include global commodity flows, across spatial scales

Ecosystem services supply in protected mountains of Greece: setting the baseline for conservation management

The mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services, an initiative under the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020, sets the basis for national ecosystem assessments in EU Member States, including Greece. The highly diverse and heterogeneous Greek landscape provides multiple ecosystem services (ES) and benefits to society. However, the rich knowledge base corresponds to limited research to support a national ecosystem assessment in Greece. In this paper, we apply a rapid method to map ecosystem types and quantify ES supply provided by mountainous protected areas. Using habitat type level data, we created a detailed ecosystem type map that was used as a baseline to assess the supply of provisioning and regulating and maintenance ES. We also applied a site-oriented approach to record and score the ES supply in each protected area. Summing up individual ES supply resulted in a total ES supply map which was used to identify ES hot spot areas within the Greek Natura 2000 mountainous sites. The results: a) corroborate the hypothesis that protected areas should be treated as high value bio-physical and social-cultural complexes accounting for a significant part of the national capital; b) highlight data gaps at the national level and limitations of ES mapping methods under such data restrictions; c) are intended to provide to stakeholders and decision makers, baseline information for future applied research and conservation management actions.JRC.D.3-Land Resource