Landscapes for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
Managing landscapes for biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services is a current priority for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and other stakeholders. Several initiatives exist that encourage cooperative management at the landscape level, and there are multiple ‘clusters’ of farmers, land managers, and conservation organisations, that fall under these initiatives whereby several stakeholders come together to cooperatively manage land parcels at landscape scales to deliver enhanced benefits.
There are benefits to a cooperative management approach for different sectors including, farming (food production, pollination, soil), conservation NGOs (wildlife), utility companies (water quality), general public (public goods) and policy makers (effective use of public money, environmental protection and food security). There are however, inevitable trade-offs and also possible multiple solutions depending on the priorities of the stakeholders. There is therefore need for transparent, evidence-led processes to help optimise land use choices to best meet the needs of the different communities involved.
Scientific research can provide independent transparent information forming a linchpin in the sphere of available evidence. While single research projects focused on particular aspects of biodiversity and ecosystem services are important in exploring specific hypotheses, these are rarely useful in isolation. Particularly useful for policy makers, practitioner communities and advisory groups is pertinent information from multiple research projects that can be collated, consolidated and delivered in a relevant and easily accessible manner. Most research projects focus on finding the solution to pertinent issues but there is still a need to collate and translate these findings into accessible formats which is where a knowledge exchange fellowship can build capacity and add immense value.
AIM: This fellowship aims to bring together information from several UKRI and European funded projects across the University of Reading that assess landscape level interventions and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services to aid cooperative management decisions at the landscape scale.
The fellowship will facilitate stakeholders from different communities coming together to
(a) gain information from existing projects,
(b) inform researchers of evidence needs and
(c) share real-world experience and good practices.