BC3 Seminars: Catchment zoning to enhance co-benefits and minimise trade-offs between ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation

Seminar Title:
“Catchment zoning to enhance co-benefits and minimise trade-offs between ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation”

Integrating ecosystem services (ES) in landscape planning can help identify conservation opportunities by fostering co-benefits between biodiversity conservation and maintenance of regulation and cultural ecosystem services. However, potential trade-offs that arise from accounting for provisioning ES incompatible with biodiversity conservation should be considered. These trade-offs have been, however, overlooked to date, especially in freshwater systems. I will demonstrate how to identify priority areas to enhance co-benefits between conservation of freshwater biodiversity (139 species of freshwater fish, turtles and waterbirds) and two regulation-cultural ES (carbon storage/ flood retention and perennial water availability) while minimising trade-off with two provisioning ES (groundwater provisioning and recreational fisheries) using a catchment in northern Australia as a case study. This novel approach can help address the increasingly complex catchment management challenges arising from increasing demand for provisioning services and diminishing availability of resources, and management and planning challenges in other realms facing similar problems.

Lecturer:

Dr. Virgilio Hermoso

Centre Tecnològic Forestal de Catalunya

Lecturer:

Dr. Simone Langhans (IGB)

Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin, Germany.