September 26, 2018
Achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement requires forest-based mitigation. Collective progress towards this goal will be assessed by the Paris Agreement’s Global stocktake. At present, there is a discrepancy of about 4 GtCO2 yr−1 in global anthropogenic net land-use emissions between global models (reflected in IPCC assessment reports) and aggregated national GHG inventories (under the UNFCCC). We show that a substantial part of this discrepancy (about 3.2 GtCO2 yr−1) can be explained by conceptual differences in anthropogenic forest sink estimation, related to the representation of environmental change impacts and the areas considered as managed.
October 4, 2018
Scientists, stakeholders and decision makers face trade-offs between adopting simple or complex approaches when modeling ecosystem services (ES). Complex approaches may be time- and data-intensive, making them more challenging to implement and difficult to scale, but can produce more accurate and locally specific results. In contrast, simple approaches allow for faster assessments but may sacrifice accuracy and credibility. The ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES) modeling platform has endeavored to provide a spectrum of simple to complex ES models that are readily accessible to a broad range of users
December 20, 2018
Freshwater biodiversity is declining, despite national and international efforts to manage and protect freshwater ecosystems. Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has been proposed as an approach that could more efficiently and adaptively balance ecological and societal needs. However, this raises the question of how social and ecological objectives can be included in an integrated management plan. Here, we present a generic model-coupling framework tailored to address this question for freshwater ecosystems, using three components: biodiversity, ecosystem services (ESS), and a spatial prioritisation that aims to balance the spatial representation of biodiversity and ESS supply and demand.
December 20, 2018
Five new publications related to ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES) applications have been recently published on a special issue of Science of the Total Environment. These publications have been developed by BC3 researchers Ferdinando Villa, Stefano Balbi, Ainhoa Magrach, María Almagro and Javier Mártinez, in collaboration with other researchers from other institutions belonging to the AQUACROSS project