According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Europe’s landscapes are the most altered and fragmented in the world due to its long history of urbanization, agriculture, river management and extensive rail and road transportation systems. This has led to impacted aquatic and riparian ecosystems, reduction in ecosystem services, loss of biodiversity and increased exposure to climate change. To reduce these impacts, restoration strategies must strategically target key watershed processes and attributes in aquatic, riparian and upland environments but in ways that also support local communities. EU’s “Green Infrastructure” initiative (2013) is designed to address this challenge, including as a linked network of restoration activities to enhance a wide range of ecosystem services (water purification, flood control, sediment abatement, carbon sequestration, aquatic foods). GI allows optimizing investments in order to move our system closer to its natural functioning. These solutions should be based on an optimums discretization of the territory to choose de most convenient actions. However, the application of GINs over whole catchments is still in earlier stages of development, presenting important knowledge gaps that should be solved to achieve an optimal implementation. In this sense, given the watershed, landscape and country-wide scales of GIN applications, geospatial tools are required for practitioners ranging from scientists to planners.
Date:
Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - 08:30 to Friday, October 27, 2017 - 14:00
Location:
Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain