Robert Kenward

Vice-Chair of IUCN Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group

Concepts, case studies and design for environmental decision support: the TESS project.

Many services for humans from ecosystems depend on biodiversity, which in turn depends on the diversity of soils, climate, topography and human uses of land and water. Through local management of land, in farming, forestry, settlements and recreation, humans make many small changes which sum up to change ecosystems and their biodiversity. If changes can be monitored, adaptive and predictive management can be applied to produce changes that maintain or restore biodiversity-based ecosystem services. Case studies showed local managers and civic groups to be competent and easily motivated to produce monitoring data, as maps of species and habitats. However, despite many predictive models in databases, very few were suitable for fine-scale management by non-scientists. TESS therefore designed a system to exchange mapped local data for decision support on management of land and species. Such a system needs wide use if its data are also to give adequate coverage to guide planners and policy makers at higher levels. Partners therefore also launched internet systems to signpost and encourage use of such a system by communities of interest (www.naturalliance.eu) and local administrative communities (e.g. http://arne-parish-council.sycl.net).

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