Category Archives: Ecosystem services

Readings on ES in a Social-Ecological Context (with a resilience emphasis)

Recently I developed a short reading list for PhD students working on ecosystem services at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.  This list seeks to cover and introduce a broad area of ecosystem service research with a focus on understanding ecosystem services … Continue reading

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Tim Daw on ecosystem services tradeoffs

In the video below Tim Daw, from the University of East Anglia’s School of International Development and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, explains his project Participatory Modelling of Wellbeing Tradeoffs in Coastal Kenya. The project, in which I’m also participating, has … Continue reading

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Can Geoengineering and Planetary stewardship be combined?

Should we deliberately intervene in the Earth system to counteract the negative impacts of climate change? Certainly not, if we ask prominent Earth system scholar Will Steffen. In a recent article published in Ambio , Steffen and colleagues argue that … Continue reading

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Conceptualizing Social-Ecological Systems

I’ve recently been teaching about social-ecological systems and because I think it is important to conceptualize systems graphically these discussions caused me to reflect on the conceptual diagrams of social-ecological systems Conceptualizing something as a social-ecological system hides some aspects … Continue reading

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Ecosystem services and poverty alleviation

Ecosystem services for poverty alleviation (ESPA) is an exciting new research programme funded by a consortium of development and science agencies in the UK. I’m on ESPA’s international advisory board and they asked me for some thoughts on the ecosystem … Continue reading

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A new global database of plant traits – TRY

An ongoing research programme in ecology is to use species traits to model ecosystem dynamics and function.   Most of the effort on traits has focussed on plants. TRY is an exciting new global database of plant traits that has managed … Continue reading

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Three new positions in ecosystem services research at McGill University

We’re looking to hire three new people to join our team working on the role of landscape structure and biodiversity in the provision of ecosystem services. The new positions include a postdoc to work on developing models of ecosystem services, … Continue reading

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Chicago invests in resilient ecological infrastructure

Leslie Kaufman in the New York Times has a good article, A City Prepares for a Warm Long-Term Forecast, that reviews Chicago’s efforts to improve its ecological infrastructure. The article describes the city’s approach to climate change adaptation: As a … Continue reading

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Nobel Symposium in Stockholm

I just argued the human role in the Anthropocene with Will Steffen at the 2011 Nobel Laureate Symposium in Stockholm.  In a mock court, in front of a jury of Nobelists, I successfully argued that: 1) Humanity has pushed the … Continue reading

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Steve Carpenter wins Stockholm Water Prize

Big congratulations to my former post-doc advisor Steve Carpenter on winning the 2011  Stockholm Water Prize.  It is well deserved as Steve has done a huge amount of really innovative work on ecosystem dynamics, ecological economics, large scale ecosystem experiments,  … Continue reading

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