Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (BESS)

Ecosystems deliver products such as food, fibre and fuel as well as a range of essential services but we know little about the level of biodiversity needed to sustain them, and how to manage land and resources to achieve this.

Aim

The BESS programme will:

• define how biodiversity underpins the delivery of different ecosystem services at a range of scales and across gradients;
• establish whether there are critical levels of biodiversity required to deliver different kinds of  services under different driver-pressure scenarios, as well as which enhance the resilience of ecosystems to those different drivers;
• develop novel tools and indicators appropriate for tracking and measuring biodiversity and ecosystem services under those different scenarios.

Who will benefit?

The biodiversity science community, landowners, planners, conservation groups, local authorities and many others who need to take an ecosystem approach to environmnetal management.
 

PROGRAMME FACTS AND FIGURES

Start and end dates: 01/02/2011 to 31/01/2017
Website: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/programmes/bess/background.asp
Contact: dedb@nerc.ac.uk