Date:
Location:
Laura Dee
University of Minnesota
"Conserving Ecosystems and Their Services in a Changing and Uncertain World"
Abstract: Halting the decline of both biodiversity and the benefits ecosystems provide to society (i.e., ecosystem services) is a major challenge for scientists and managers. Meeting both objectives requires an understanding of 1) how global change drivers (e.g., climate, biodiversity, and socioeconomic change) influence each goal, and 2) how pursuing one objective will impact the other. This talk will address these two questions in turn. First, I will present my past and ongoing work on how climate change is impacting ecosystem services, including global fisheries yields, regional timber production in Minnesota, and a broader range of services across systems and scales. Second, I will share my research examining alignment between the objectives of providing ecosystem services and conserving biodiversity. I quantify how alignment depends on uncertainty over links between biodiversity and services, non-random changes in biodiversity, and complex patterns of species interactions. I analyze the two questions from both a theoretical and empirical perspective, leveraging dynamic programming, network theory, and statistics for observational data. This work provides new insights into how global change impacts ecosystem services and when managing for these services can provide the strongest incentives for conservation.