RUBICODE Rationalising Biodiversity Conservation in Dynamic Ecosystems

The development of flexible and effective conservation strategies and their implementation will be essential in order to halt the loss of biodiversity. These should concentrate on managing dynamic ecosystems for maintaining their capacity to undergo disturbance, while retaining their functions, services and control mechanisms (ecological resilience). RUBICODE will concentrate on assessing the ecological resilience of those components of biological diversity essential for maintaining ecosystem services. There are seven specific project objectives:

• To develop and apply concepts of dynamic ecosystems and the services they provide, covering both terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems in a comprehensive framework.
• To explore relationships between service-providing populations, ecosystem resilience, function and health, and socio-economic and environmental drivers of biodiversity change.
• To improve and test indicators that provide rapid assessment methods for monitoring ecosystem and habitat ecological quality.
• To characterise biological traits that lead to a population becoming threatened, rare or invasive.
• To develop habitat management strategies that take account of drivers of biodiversity change in order to maintain threatened populations or assist populations to adapt.
• 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.
• To identify gaps in knowledge and propose a plan for future research that is required to develop innovative pan-European conservation strategies for terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.

Major results planned from the RUBICODE project:

1. Review and development of concepts of dynamic ecosystems and the services they provide
2. Review linking the dynamics of ecosystem service provision with human preference formation and the dynamics of values
3. Workshop (and accompanying report) on ecosystem goods and services, their value and drivers of biodiversity change
4. Review of socio-economic and environmental drivers that affect ecosystems and their services and a comparison of scenario studies
5. Review of trait-based approaches relevant to ecosystem service provision, including an assessment of relationships between traits and invasiveness
6. Review and workshop on ecological indicators, including comparisons of indicator systems targeting habitat area, deviation from undisturbed areas and disturbance gradients, and those targeting threatened, protected and invasive species
7. Reviews and workshop to compare current practices for habitat management in Europe and their limitations, to evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of existing conservation strategies, and to identify innovative strategies that take better account of the dynamic nature of ecosystems and the provision of ecological services

Further information:

RUBICODE project.