The European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 Coordination and Support Action ESMERALDA aimed at developing guidance and a flexible methodology for Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) to support the EU member states in the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy’s Target 2 Action 5. ESMERALDA’s key tasks included network creation, stakeholder engagement, enhancing ecosystem services mapping and assessment methods across various spatial scales and value domains, work in case studies and support of EU member states in MAES implementation. Thus ESMERALDA aimed at integrating various project outcomes around four major strands: i) Networking, ii) Policy, iii) Research and iv) Application. The objective was to provide guidance for integrated ecosystem service mapping and assessment that can be used for sustainable decision-making in policy, business, society, practice and science at EU, national and regional levels. This article presents the overall ESMERALDA approach of integrating the above-mentioned project components and outcomes and provides an overview of how the enhanced methods were applied and how they can be used to support MAES implementation in the EU member states. Experiences with implementing such a large pan-European Coordination and Support Action in the context of EU policy are discussed and recommendations for future actions are given.
Since the foundation of the ecosystem services concept in the ninetieth of the last century (Costanza et al. 1998, Costanza et al. 1997, de Groot 1992), many methods to map and assess ecosystem services have been developed and applied to policy and business questions worldwide. While many flexible methods exist at different spatial scales and ecosystem types, Jax et al. (2018) express the difficulty in choosing and applying the correct method to the right topic of interest. To enable a selection of appropriate methods, Harrison et al. (2018) developed a decision tree approach. However, Dunford et al. (2018) argue that often not a single method but a combination of methods are required for appropriate decision-making in real world situations. Thus, applying the concept of ecosystem services in practice is challenging, especially at institutional level (Saarikoski et al. 2018). This hampers comparability, applicability and transferability of ecosystem services assessments and related mapping applications across scales and European regions. It also impedes a solid overview of existing methods suitable for use at different scales in different biomes and types of ecosystems. These challenges require a consistent knowledge capitalisation infrastructure, where information is synthesised in a publicly accessible portal to enable a consistent description of different ecosystem conditions and the services they provide. Going beyond the previously mentioned challenges requires a flexible methodology for assessing and mapping ecosystem services. The Horizon 2020 project ESMERALDA (Enhancing ecoSysteM sERvices mApping for poLicy and Decision mAking) developed this methodology and implemented it into the "MAES explorer"*5 and the "MAES Methods Explorer*1 (MME)". The MME complements previous developments from the EU projects OpenNESS*2 and OPERAs*3. In contrast to the OPPLA*4 case-study-finder with case study areas and accompanied study area booklets and descriptions, MME focuses on methods for mapping and assessing ecosystem services and links those to selected literature and case studies. Additionally, MME provides a comprehensive and publicly searchable collection of peer-reviewed journal references and grey literature about mapping and assessing ecosystem services in Europe. This compilation is cross-related with the case study booklets produced by the ESMERALDA project and particularly methods, which are specifically used to assess and map particular ecosystem services within the case study area. Thus, searching for and filtering of particular case study areas, (related) literature references and/or methods is possible. Santos-Martin et al. (2018) provide the detailed description about the scientific procedure behind the MME tool described here.
Extreme weather events are likely to increase in the future, and thus damage to the environment and infrastructure will likely increase during this time, too. To adapt to these weather impacts, forecasting, now-casting, and in situ monitoring installations have increased during the last years. Even though monitoring stations deliver frequent measurements in realtime, a dynamic implementation of measurement frequencies, adapted to certain environmental conditions, are rarely implemented. Within this paper we provide a framework where low frequency phosphorus measurements in the Mondsee catchment can be adapted to high frequency measurements during storm events. When heavy rainfall is observed, a threshold event triggers a reconfiguration task for the phosphorus measurement device, using asynchronous, push-based communication. A Sensor Planning Service commits such a request into the wireless sensor network, and updates the measurement frequency of the target nodes to enable nutrient peak flow estimation during storm events. This setup introduces the possibility of measurements in flooded areas without using traditional (manual) sampling methods, and we expect to obtain a better understanding of discharge to phosphorus runoff relations.
In the past decades, climate changes became increasingly noticed. As a result of these changes, many extreme events such as flooding and droughts occur. These have an expected increasing impact on society and the environment. Especially the Alps are affected with a stronger increasing temperature compared to the rest of Europe. As a societal reaction, adaptation strategies and tools have been launched. Among the adaptation tools are web-based adaptation platforms, which are assumed to be important governance tools. They support knowledge brokerage, awareness raising, capacity building, and crosslevel coordination. Within this manuscript we identify available platforms and previous Alpine Space Programme projects and their interdisciplinary and cross-subject climate change related information. We analyse available portals and elaborate design and user requirements for the Climate Change Knowledge Inventory Platform developed here. We found that many previously developed platforms integrate similar information, but automated information exchange between platforms is scarce due to interoperability limitations. To avoid these double works of entering the same findings again, our developed catalogue service for the web solution ensures standard compliant information provision to enable interoperability and thus the exchange of climate change information across platforms.
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