Tuesday 26 March 2019 16:00 – 17:00 A. Payatakes Seminar Room
” Biodiversity and Environmental Heterogeneity Surrogates in Systematic Conservation Planning ”
Dr. Aggeliki Doxa Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics (IACM)
Abstract
Systematic conservation planning tools have been recently broadly used to spatially identify management priorities and help minimize potential impacts from surrounding human activities. Fine-filter approaches that focus on specific species are most commonly used for setting nature conservation priorities worldwide. Alternatively, instead of using species as biodiversity surrogates, coarse-filter approaches focus on preserving environmental characteristics and have recently gained increasing attention yet their connection to conservation planning still remains limited. I will present examples from the two approaches based on my previous and present work. The case studies will focus on how and which biodiversity and environmental surrogates are useful and how to select them. They will also illustrate how combining conservation with land use (ex. urban) planning may provide guidelines to avoid losing irreplaceable, high nature value areas and give concrete management tools to evaluate the efficiency of the existing protected areas network and set future conservation priorities.