The RUBICODE project draws on expertise from a range of disciplines to develop and integrate frameworks for assessing the impacts of environmental change on ecosystem service provision, and for rationalising biodiversity conservation in that light. With such diverse expertise and concepts involved, interested parties will not be familiar with all the key terminology. This paper defines the terms as used within the project and, where useful, discusses some reasoning behind the definitions. Terms are grouped by concept rather than being listed alphabetically.
Using a range of different methods including extensive reviews, workshops and an electronic conference, 70 key research recommendations and 12 priority research needs to integrate the ecosystem services approach into biodiversity conservation policy and funding were identified by a cross-disciplinary group of over 100 scientists and 50 stakeholders, including research funders and policy-makers. These recommendations focus on the ecological underpinning of ecosystem services, drivers that affect ecosystems and their services, biological traits and ecosystem services, the valuation of ecosystem services, spatial and temporal scales in ecosystem service assessment, indicators of ecosystem services, and habitat management, conservation policy and ecosystem services. The First two authors contributed equally to this work. recommendations in this paper help steer the research agenda on ecosystem services into policy-relevant areas, agreed upon by funders, researchers and policy-makers. This research agenda will only succeed with increased collaboration between researchers across disciplines, thereby providing a challenge to the research community and research funders to work in new, interdisciplinary ways.
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