Dataset Information

Ecosystem services in European protected areas: Ambiguity in the views of scientists and managers?

ABSTRACT: Protected Areas are a key component of nature conservation. They can play an important role in counterbalancing the impacts of ecosystem degradation. For an optimal protection of a Protected Area it is essential to account for the variables underlying the major Ecosystem Services an area delivers, and the threats upon them. Here we show that the perception of these important variables differs markedly between scientists and managers of Protected Areas in mountains and transitional waters. Scientists emphasise variables of abiotic and biotic nature, whereas managers highlight socio-economic, cultural and anthropogenic variables. This indicates fundamental differences in perception. To be able to better protect an area it would be advisable to bring the perception of scientists and managers closer together. Intensified and harmonised communication across disciplinary and professional boundaries will be needed to implement and improve Ecosystem Service oriented management strategies in current and future Protected Areas.

SUBMITTER: Hummel C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5687704 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Ecosystem services in European protected areas: Ambiguity in the views of scientists and managers?

Hummel Christiaan C Provenzale Antonello A van der Meer Jaap J Wijnhoven Sander S Nolte Arno A Poursanidis Dimitris D Janss Guyonne G Jurek Matthias M Andresen Magnus M Poulin Brigitte B Kobler Johannes J Beierkuhnlein Carl C Honrado João J Razinkovas Arturas A Stritih Ana A Bargmann Tessa T Ziemba Alex A Bonet-García Francisco F Adamescu Mihai Cristian MC Janssen Gerard G Hummel Herman H

PloS one 20171115 11

Protected Areas are a key component of nature conservation. They can play an important role in counterbalancing the impacts of ecosystem degradation. For an optimal protection of a Protected Area it is essential to account for the variables underlying the major Ecosystem Services an area delivers, and the threats upon them. Here we show that the perception of these important variables differs markedly between scientists and managers of Protected Areas in mountains and transitional waters. Scient ...[more]

PMID: 29140983

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Project description:The economic valuation of ecosystem services in part reflects the desire to use conventional economic tools (markets and economic instruments) to conserve ecosystem services. However, for regulating and supporting ecosystem services that depend on ecosystem structure and function, estimation of economic value requires estimates of the current level of underlying ecological functions first. This primary step is in principle, the job of environmental scientists, not economists. Here, we provide a coarse-level quantitative assessment of the relationship between the research effort expended by environmental scientists (on the biophysical values) and economists (on the monetary values) on 15 different regulating and supporting services in 32 ecosystem types using peer-reviewed article hits retrieved from bibliographic databases as a measure of research effort. We find a positive, moderately strong (r = 0.69) correlation between research efforts in the two domains, a result that, while encouraging, is likely to reflect serendipity rather than the deliberate design of integrated environmental science-economics research programs. Our results suggest that compared to environmental science research effort economic valuation is devoted to a smaller, less diverse set of ecosystem services but a broader, more diverse, set of ecosystem types. The two domains differed more with respect to the ecosystem services that are the major focus of research effort than they did with respect to the ecosystem types of principal research interest. For example, carbon sequestration, erosion regulation, and nutrient cycling receive more relative research effort in the environmental sciences; air quality regulation in economic valuations. For both domains, cultivated areas, wetlands, and urban/semi-urban ecosystem types received relatively large research effort, while arctic and mountain tundra, cave and subterranean, cryosphere, intertidal/littoral zone, and kelp forest ecosystem types received negligible research effort. We suggest ways and means by which the field of sustainability science may be improved by the design and implementation of a searchable database of environmental science and economic valuation literature as well as a global ecosystem service research network and repository that explicitly links research on the estimation and prediction of biophysical ecosystem functions with that of the social sciences and other knowledge systems. These suggestions would, at least in principle, facilitate a more efficient research agenda between economists and environmental scientists and aid management, regulatory and judicial decision-makers.

Dataset Information

Ecosystem services in European protected areas: Ambiguity in the views of scientists and managers?

Publications

Ecosystem services in European protected areas: Ambiguity in the views of scientists and managers?

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