No 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.

In the "digital conservation" age, big data from Earth observations and from social media have been increasingly used to tackle conservation challenges. Here, we combined information from those two digital sources in a multimodel inference framework to identify, map, and predict the potential for nature's cultural contributions to people in two contrasting UNESCO biosphere reserves: Doñana and Sierra Nevada (Spain). The content analysis of Flickr pictures revealed different cultural contributions, according to the natural and cultural values of the two reserves. Those contributions relied upon landscape variables computed from Earth observation data: the variety of colors and vegetation functioning that characterize Doñana landscapes, and the leisure facilities, accessibility features, and heterogeneous landscapes that shape Sierra Nevada. Our findings suggest that social media and Earth observations can aid in the cost-efficient monitoring of nature's contributions to people, which underlie many Sustainable Development Goals and conservation targets in protected areas worldwide. K E Y W O R D Sbig data, crowdsourced photos, cultural values, Doñana, ecosystem services, multimodel inference, protected areas, participatory sensing, remote sensing, Sierra NevadaThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Over the past decade, long-term socio-ecological research (LTSER) has been established to better integrate social science research and societal concerns into the goals and objectives of the International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network, an established global network of long-term ecological monitoring sites. The Horizon 2020 eLTER project, currently underway, includes as one of its key objectives to evaluate the performance of LTSER platforms. This article reflects part of this evaluation: six LTSER platforms were assessed through site visits of the lead author, coupled with reflections and insights of the platform managers, who are also co-authors. We provide background for the mission and goals of LTSER, then assess the six international LTSER platforms-Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER, USA; Braila Island LTSER, Romania; Cairngorms LTSER, UK; Doñana LTSER, Spain; Omora Ethnobotanical Park Cape Horn LTER, Chile; and Sierra Nevada LTSER, Spain. While based on a strong theoretical foundation in socio-ecological research, there has been a steep learning curve for scientists applying the concept in practice at LTSER platforms. We show positive impacts that have been achieved, including contributions to policy, land-use planning, and natural resource management. We explain key aspects of LTSER platforms that have proven challenging, including management, interdisciplinary integration, and stakeholder collaboration. We characterize the tensions between top-down desires for network harmonization, bottom-up demands such as local policy relevance, and platform-level constraints such as time and budget. Finally, we discuss challenges, such as local context dominating the character of LTSER platforms, and the fact that scientists are often disincentivized from engaging in transdisciplinary science. Overall, we conclude that while the international network offers important advantages to its members, a more productive balance between local and global goals could be achieved, and members may need to temper their expectations of what the network can and cannot offer at the local level.