School of Geography and the Environment

RUBICODE - Rationalising Biodiversity Conservation in Dynamic Ecosystems

A key problem in developing policies to stop biodiversity loss is translating threats into a tangible factor for decision-making. RUBICODE will contribute to solving this by examining what biodiversity does for us. Biological units that provide specific services to society will be identified and their services valued, so that they can be compared with more traditional economic valuations. This will give decision-makers a more rational base and will help the understanding of the need for adequate conservation policies, which are essential to halting biodiversity loss.

Nature is fundamentally dynamic, as are the pressures of human activities on biodiversity, yet most conservation strategies still involve a static view of nature. For the realisation of future conservation objectives it is critical that new strategies and policies incorporate these dynamics. RUBICODE will address this by developing integrated dynamic concepts for conservation strategies and examples of their application at multiple scales.

RUBICODE will prioritise these strategies for the most significant European terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems by reviewing the impacts of global change on those components of biodiversity essential for maintaining ecosystem services. Important and threatened services will be identified and methods for relating biodiversity in dynamic ecosystems to the provision of these services will be compared and tested. Frameworks for linking biodiversity traits to service provision and for improving and testing indicators will be developed and used to explore management strategies and inform priorities for biodiversity conservation policy. RUBICODE will also identify current gaps in knowledge and propose a roadmap for future research.

RUBICODE will involve a large number of external experts, and stakeholders from the policy and practice communities, to ensure the relevance of the new concepts, their integration into conservation and to help with their dissemination.

The objectives of RUBICODE are:

1. To develop and apply concepts of dynamic ecosystems and the services they provide, covering both terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems in a comprehensive framework.
2. To explore relationships between service-providing populations, ecosystem resilience, function and health, and socio-economic and environmental drivers of biodiversity change.
3. To improve and test indicators that provide rapid assessment methods for monitoring ecosystem and habitat ecological quality.
4. To characterise biological traits that lead to a population becoming threatened, rare or invasive.
5. To develop habitat management strategies that take account of drivers of biodiversity change in order to maintain threatened populations or assist populations to adapt.
6. To suggest priorities for habitat, ecosystem and landscape biodiversity conservation policy on the basis of dynamic ecosystems and the services they provide, including the perfection and maintenance of endangered habitat lists.
7. To propose a roadmap for future research that is required to develop innovative pan-European conservation strategies for terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.

Links

Rubicode Project website

Partners

Twenty-three partners are involved in RUBICODE:

1. Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, UK
2. ALTERRA Wageningen UR, The Netherlands
3. Median SCP, Spain
4. Prospex bvba, Belgium
5. University of Lund, Sweden
6. University of Aegean, Greece
7. University of Edinburgh, UK
8. Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute for Forecasting, Slovakia
9. University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
10. Instituto Ambiente e Vida, University of Coimbra, Portugal
11. Rothamsted Research, UK
12. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
13. University of Salzburg, Austria
14. University of Tartu, Estonia
15. Institute of Environmental and Landscape Management, St. Istvan University, Hungary
16. NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, UK
17. Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Germany
18. Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
19. University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
20. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biologia Vegetal, CONICET and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
21. Charles Sturt University, Australia
22. Lincoln University, New Zealand
23. US Geological Survey, USA