El próximo lunes 13 de mayo a las 13:00 se llevará a cabo en la sede del CEIGRAM un seminario sobre “Multi-scale analysis of the global biodiversity footprints of large cities”, impartido por Philipp Semenchuk, investigador de la Universidad de Viena, y que actualmente se encuentra de estancia en el CEIGRAM.
Philipp Semenchuk is a trained ecologist and received his PhD from the University of Tromso, Norway in 2013. His background is in field-work based impact assessment of climate change on pristine Arctic soil and plant communities. In June 2018, he joined an inter-disciplinary team working on two projects: (1) estimating impacts of agriculture and forestry on ecosystem services, and (2) evaluating the effectivity of the protected area network of Austria during climate change. His main task within the team is to integrate relevant variables from socio-economic research into biodiversity modelling via a variety of statistical and spatial analysis tools.
Cities exert pressure on biodiversity beyond their own territories related to their populations’ consumption of food, energy and other products. We will develop an approach to quantify, map and predict the national and global “biodiversity footprint” of large cities. The approach will combine methods from socio-economical sustainability science (material flow analysis) and biodiversity research (macro-ecological modelling).
Specifically, we will calculate the global biodiversity footprint based on cities’ consumption of land-based biomass products by applying the species-area and -energy hypotheses. We will expand and improve an existing model (countryside species area relationship model, cSAR) and parametrize it with worldwide plot-scale data of species richness across a range of land use categories (PREDICTS database) and gridded land use data (e.g. NPPeco = NPP remaining in the ecosystem after harvest). The assumption that the removal of NPP for human consumption equals the removal of energy from the ecosystem is the theoretical basis for empirically quantifying the direct relationship between NPPeco and species richness of plant and animal communities at the place of commodity production. By modifying the cities’ calculated consumption patterns (e.g. increase the proportion of organically grown products, change supply chains etc.), we will estimate the option space in respect to impacts on biodiversity. This last step will explore the considerable potential of cities towards fulfilling UN sustainable development goals.
Due to the team’s expertise and availability of consumption data from the city of Vienna, Austria, we will use this city as our model system. Based on experiences gained from this project, further cities may be evaluated.
Si deseas asistir al seminario puedes apuntarte en el siguiente enlace.