SCALES: A new EU project on Biodiversity

The Eco-land lab gets involved in a new EU funded project in partnership with the European Bird Census Council (http://www.ebcc.info/).

Biodiversity and its effective management are inextricably related to scale. The main pressures on Europe’s terrestrial biodiversity and the socio-economic drivers behind these pressures act differently at different scales. Effective conservation measures must thus explicitly consider a) scales at which effects occur and b) any interactions among the pressures that cause non-linearities among and within the different scales. The SCALES project is designed to provide the integrated, natural and social scientific research needed to guide such action.

SCALES will advance and integrate our understanding of natural and anthropogenic processes and their effects upon biodiversity at different scales by applying recent methodological advances to new and existing data and by the development of new methods and approaches for innovative analyses of biodiversity processes and data across scales, of how these processes interact across scales and affect biodiversity, and of how this knowledge can be used to improve the scale-sensitivity and scale effectiveness of policy instruments for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

The Eco-land lab will be involved in different work-packages mainly regarding the investigation of new approaches to integrate heterogeneous, large-scale monitoring data into meaningful information to be used for conservation planning at different spatial scales.

http://www.scales-project.net/