Objective
To stop biodiversity declines and meet future challenges, a better understanding is needed on how biodiversity is affected by historic and current land use changes.
In the COCONUT project we will
(1) gather existing and new data on both historic and current species richness and land use (GIS) across Europe,
(2) synthesise these data and perform meta-analyses to assess the extent of biodiversity loss and to understand how land use change affects biodiversity change,
3) use the results to parameterize predictive models to project future land use and biodiversity change in response to socio-economic scenarios,
4) based on these results develop policy options and decision tools for main EU-policy areas mitigating future biodiversity loss.
Detailed data will be collected in 5 case study areas to investigate extinction debt, extent of habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation and impacts on biodiversity as a result of historic land use changes dating up to 100 years back.
European scale effects of habitat loss will be explored by data mining of Natura 2000 and other available data bases on biodiversity and land use. Meta-analyses of existing data on land use and diversity of plants, invertebrates and birds will be performed in synthesis workshops to which external data holders are invited.
Future land use scenarios will be linked to biodiversity models that predict risk of species extinction. Scenario based modelling of future land use and organization of workshops will enable to identify policy options to minimize and mitigate biodiversity loss resulting from future land use changes.
Strong links among the partners to several EU-projects (e.g. ALARM, BIOPRESS), MACIS (task 2 in this same call), and national data bases will enable access to data, tools and information critical for the development of large scale, general predictions of biodiversity effects on land use change, and development of policy options for land use management.
Fields of science
Keywords
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP6-2005-SSP-5-A
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
7070 UPPSALA
Sweden