Why the Montérégie Connection?
People depend on ecosystem services (ES) such as provision of food and freshwater, pollination of crops, places for recreation, and flood control. Humanity has expended substantial effort to engineer ecosystems and manage particular species to cheaply and reliably produce individual ES such as food. However, these efforts have often overlooked the fact that landscapes simultaneously produce multiple ES that interact in complex, dynamic ways across scales. Thus, human modification of ecosystems and the amplification of certain species and ecosystem functions to meet particular human needs has often had unintended consequences including declines in biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ES.
Although scientists have assessed threats to ES, calculated the value of services provided, mapped supply and demand, and assessed the current and potential future status of ES, we still have relatively little understanding of the ecology behind the links among landscape connectivity, biodiversity, and ES needed to effectively manage the provision of a portfolio of multiple services. In particular, existing approaches for studying ES tend to disregard the spatial and temporal factors affecting ES (i.e., the effects of previous land use on current provision of ES and the impacts of neighboring land use on ES provision at a location of interest).
People depend on ecosystem services (ES) such as provision of food and freshwater, pollination of crops, places for recreation, and flood control. Humanity has expended substantial effort to engineer ecosystems and manage particular species to cheaply and reliably produce individual ES such as food. However, these efforts have often overlooked the fact that landscapes simultaneously produce multiple ES that interact in complex, dynamic ways across scales. Thus, human modification of ecosystems and the amplification of certain species and ecosystem functions to meet particular human needs has often had unintended consequences including declines in biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ES.
Although scientists have assessed threats to ES, calculated the value of services provided, mapped supply and demand, and assessed the current and potential future status of ES, we still have relatively little understanding of the ecology behind the links among landscape connectivity, biodiversity, and ES needed to effectively manage the provision of a portfolio of multiple services. In particular, existing approaches for studying ES tend to disregard the spatial and temporal factors affecting ES (i.e., the effects of previous land use on current provision of ES and the impacts of neighboring land use on ES provision at a location of interest).
Biodiversity influences the provision of ES through the number, abundance, and composition of species, functional types, and communities. Biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning, and in turn ES, are known mostly from experiments at scales that do not capture regional dynamics and real-world ecosystem management. Recent theory has extended the link between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity to the landscape level. Landscape configuration (e.g., the connectivity of habitat corridors) is likely critical to the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in heterogeneous landscapes. Fragmented landscapes with low connectivity lose biodiversity, become more homogeneous, and maintain less productive and more variable ecosystems. Assessing these interactions in a social-ecological context at a landscape scale, such as we are doing with the Montérégie Connection project, will significantly advance our scientific understanding of processes critical to management of ES.
Despite many calls for ES to be explicitly and systematically integrated into decision-making, this has proven difficult to put into practice. Integrating ES into decision-making is difficult both for lack of scientific information about how decisions will affect multiple ES and for lack of understanding about how to incorporate this information when it does exist. Most existing ES models were developed to address particular issues (e.g., agriculture and water quality), and ignore interactions with other services, even if those interactions may affect the services of interest. Quantitative models to predict ES often use land use/land change as a proxy for ES, even though these proxies have been shown to be a poor fit to primary data sources for some ES, especially when information about neighbouring and historical land use/land change is not taken into account. Without a robust theory linking biodiversity, ecosystem functions and ES and quantitative models based on that framework, decision-makers cannot understand how their decisions will change provision of multiple ES across the landscape. The Montérégie Connection project is an effort to help close these gaps.
Despite many calls for ES to be explicitly and systematically integrated into decision-making, this has proven difficult to put into practice. Integrating ES into decision-making is difficult both for lack of scientific information about how decisions will affect multiple ES and for lack of understanding about how to incorporate this information when it does exist. Most existing ES models were developed to address particular issues (e.g., agriculture and water quality), and ignore interactions with other services, even if those interactions may affect the services of interest. Quantitative models to predict ES often use land use/land change as a proxy for ES, even though these proxies have been shown to be a poor fit to primary data sources for some ES, especially when information about neighbouring and historical land use/land change is not taken into account. Without a robust theory linking biodiversity, ecosystem functions and ES and quantitative models based on that framework, decision-makers cannot understand how their decisions will change provision of multiple ES across the landscape. The Montérégie Connection project is an effort to help close these gaps.