Environment Systems Presenting at the IALE Conference

Environment Systems is presenting at the IALE (International  Association for Landscape Ecology) Conference taking place at Wolverhampton University on 6th September 2011. Natalie Small will present a paper on ‘Modelling Ecosystem Services’. The paper is the result of work carried out with the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW) to devise a method of mapping a range of Ecosystem Services across Wales.

Ecosystem Services are the benefits that humans obtain from the processes and structures within ecosystems; they provide water, energy and timber, enable food production, sustain wildlife and provide employment.

This project presents a view of the Ecosystem Services operating within Wales in a way that planners and policy makers can readily understand, helping to inform environmental policy and delivery by focusing attention on the value of the environment as a whole, recognising that all components of the natural environment are interrelated and function on multiple scales. To help optimise the provision of services, planners and policy makers need to have spatial information on the areas that are important in providing them so that the full value of the environment can be considered.

Environment Systems’ work focused on individual Ecosystem Services to investigate whether they could could be mapped. In each case no single source of data was sufficient and the success of the project relied on developing a means of bringing together a number of different datasets and bring them to bear in a consistent, transparent and scientifically rigorous way.

The project has demonstrated that it is possible to visualise the location of Ecosystem Services using maps, to provide decision makers with information about how services are distributed across the landscape and give them a useful starting point for further investigation and understanding. The next phase of the project, now underway, will seek to involve the knowledge of local stakeholders and individual economic sectors in order to gain insights that guide policy making.