The need for the implementation of an Ecosystem Services assessment in Greece: drafting the national agenda

Abstract

This paper presents the establishment and the first outcomes of the Hellenic Ecosystem Services Partnership (HESP), a scientific-technical committee aiming at the guidance and coordination of the Ecosystem Services (ES) assessment in Greece. HESP consists of experts from different disciplines (ecology, marine biology, socio-ecological system science) and aims to: i) coordinate ES assessment efforts under a shared framework; ii) promote the ES approach in Greece; iii) support the European implementation of ES at the national level (Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystem and their Services initiative), and iv) fulfill priority actions regarding the ES implementation and the obligations derived from the National Biodiversity Strategy. In this paper, we present the first drafting of the National Agenda including short-and long-term objectives towards the national implementation of ‡ § ‡ | ¶ ¶ # ¤ « © Dimopoulos P et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.MAES, we outline the HESP Action Plan to 2020, as well as the timeline of the basic steps to be taken, to achieve decision making on the basis of ES maintenance and enhancement. It will also serve as a call for action to encourage more ES assessments at the national level, but also as a primer for the inclusion of protected areas and other areas of special importance for ES assessments at the EU level.

Cultural Ecosystem Services in the Natura 2000 Network: Introducing Proxy Indicators and Conflict Risk in Greece

“…In Greece, protected areas have never been evaluated for their cultural benefits or the CES they may provide to people. There are few studies with concern for aspects relevant to CES [43,44,62,74,75]. In this rather data-scarce and understudied conservation arena a rapid assessment for CES in Natura sites is an important unmet need.…”

“…Kokkoris and colleagues in 2020 [43] emphasize that new CES indicators must be tested and developed to complement the initial proposed national indicators. Baseline knowledge gaps and data scarcity have long been known to be serious hurdles for effectively protecting the Natura sites in Greece [44]. Greece's protected area system still shows developmental difficulties [45].…”

“…Exploration of data availability and quality with respect to the state-wide relevance of national indicators for MAES applications based on the review by Dimopoulos and colleagues in 2017 [44] and on datasets freely available by state authorities (links provided in Kokkoris and colleagues in 2020 [43]).…”

Improving ecosystem assessments in Mediterranean social-ecological systems: a DPSIR analysis

“…France 7 and Israel 8 ) and others that are currently in the process of developing national assessments (e.g. Dimopoulos et al 2017;Balzan et al 2018).…”

Ecosystem services supply in protected mountains of Greece: setting the baseline for conservation management

“…wind parks, hydroelectric energy stations) are in operation, hereby using ecosystems as a substrate for infrastructure. Although their importance has been partly studied in either ecological (Zervas 1998;Maas and Macklin 2002;Range et al 2005) or social-economic studies (Papadimitriou and Gibson 2008), a dedicated assessment of the dynamic social-ecological systems of Greek mountains and an assessment of their ES is missing (Dimopoulos et al 2017).…”