Linking Landscape Structure to Ecosystem Services

Professors Martine Maron and Jonathan Rhodes

The so-called "ecosystem services" represent the set of (both material and abstract) goods and services offered by ecosystems. The quantity, quality and diversity of these services can be influenced by the dynamics of space, called "landscape structures". In order to discuss the relations between these two concepts, the IEA will host the seminar Linking Landscape Structure to Ecosystem Services on April 26, at 9.00 am. There will be a live webcast.

The seminar will feature presentations by professors Martine Maron and Jonathan Rhodes, both from the University of Queensland's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences (SEES). It has been organized by IEA's Ecosystem Services Research Group, under the coordination of Jean Paul Walter Metzger, a professor at USP's Institute of Biosciences (IB).

Rhodes will present the paper The role of landscape structure for the provision of ecosystem services, in which he aims to develop a new conceptual framework that explicitly considers the links between landscape fragmentation, supply and service flow for people. According to him, the fragmentation of the landscape can have both positive and negative effects on the flow of ecosystem services. These effects will be analyzed during the seminar through testable hypotheses constructed from Rhodes's conceptual framework.

In the exhibition The many meanings of no net loss in environmental policy, Maron will examine NNL policies and related objectives, and identify three main forms of baseline scenario. In addition, she intends to categorize NNL policies as related to broad policy goals or to responses to specific impacts, and to increase transparency about which of them are actually designed to achieve.