CES - Conservation Ecology & Society

The main objective of the Conservation Ecology & Society group is to understand the best pathways to address challenges in nature conservation and management.

To achieve this, we plan to use a cross-disciplinary research perspective that combines ecological and social approaches, engaging with other sectors of society in several stages of our research.

We will work together with decision-makers to identify key societal challenges to which we can actively contribute to find solutions.

Some examples include our planned collaboration with the private sector to improve biodiversity in production forests, with city councils to establish monitoring projects, and with the governments to protect key sites for marine species.

We will also actively include the civic society in our research approach (via citizen science), and we will continue our strong effort to transfer the results of our science to practitioners, decision-makers and the general public via outreach activities. We will work in a variety of systems (e.g. agroforestry areas, urban environments, coastal and marine ecosystems) and spatial scales (from local to global) around some common questions:

1. What are the main drivers of biodiversity loss and natural resources depletion, and what is the role of human dimensions on this process?
2. What ecological mechanisms and processes facilitate nature resilience to anthropic and environmental changes?
3. How can other social actors (e.g. citizens, decision makers) contribute to finding solutions?

 Another key aspect of our work will be the collaboration with well-established networks of researchers, decision-makers and conservation practitioners. We will strengthen our engagement with the eLTER network to promote long-term monitoring of key biodiversity sites. We will also work alongside several NGOs, the private sector and other networks of biodiversity conservation to achieve our goals, both at national and international levels.