BaseShift · Shifting the baseline and assessing its impact on the status and trends of biodiversity and its implication for decision-making in conservation

Shifting the baseline and assessing its impact on the status and trends of biodiversity and its implication for decision-making in conservation

Centuries-old fur trade and whaling logbooks revealed that the native ranges of beavers in Canada and humpback whales in the Atlantic are likely quite larger than current data led to believe. In contrast, 16th century material showed that rather than being native to Spain and endangered, the white-clawed crayfish was in reality only relatively recently introduced. These examples illustrate the critical role that the choice of a baseline will have when assessing the status and trends of biodiversity, and determining the ambition (or lack thereof) of the corresponding conservation and restoration targets. Yet in practice, most of the knowledge that underlies large-scale historical descriptions of biodiversity and on which decision-making is based is either (1) modeled, at coarse resolution and/or with little to no calibration with historical data (e.g. land-uses), (2) based on relatively recent time-series (e.g. Living Planet Index starting in the 1970s), or (3) relies on space-for-time substitutions. Similarly, the trends in the capacity of nature to contribute to human wellbeing was assessed with 1970 as a reference point. To date there have only been limited attempts at quantifying the implication that these data constrains and the choice of a baseline will have on the assessed status and trends of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and how this may, in turn, influence the process for setting conservation targets and actions themselves. In this context, the main objective of the BaseShift project is to advance knowledge on baselines for biodiversity conservation by quantifying the impact of using different benchmarks to assess the trends and status of biodiversity and ecosystem services as well as its implication on the resulting conservation priorities and actions. More specifically, the project aims to quantify the baseline’s impact on (1) changes in species ranges and the resulting change in their conservation status; (2) the spatial distribution of species and the supply of ecosystem services and their impact on prioritization for area-based conservation measures; (3) the behaviour of metrics (derived from data on biodiversity and ecosystem services) and their ability to detect change (e.g. change in species richness); and (4) the determinants of specie’s fundamental niches and the niches themselves as a key component of their expected response to future change.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз