Welcome to the pages of the Coastal Wetlands Ecosystem Services Research Seminars

Natural systems play a vital part in the delivery of ecosystem services, which are the direct and indirect benefits people obtain from ecosystems.  Ecosystem services therefore help to sustain human livelihoods, health and welfare.  It is therefore of considerable importance to understand how future changes in biodiversity may affect the provision of ecosystem services.  At present, however, there is a lack of understanding of the relationship between the conservation of biodiversity and the continued delivery of ecosystem services.  There is an urgent need for further research in this area, to underpin policies for sustainable development.   However, progress in this area is hampered by various factors including a lack of consensus on how best to monitor and evaluate ecosystem service provision, a lack of available data, a lack of understanding of the ecological processes underpinning ecosystem services and a lack of understanding of the implications of ecosystem service conservation for other components of sustainable development such as equity and social justice. 

The aim of this seminar series is to address some of these key issues with respect to the ecosystem services delivered by coastal wetlands. Coastal wetland ecosystems provide many goods and services that contribute to human well-being throughout the world.  They are of particular importance in the UK where they provide economic benefits to society from fisheries and recreation, as well as wider benefits such as nutrient cycling, flood protection and conservation.  The importance of coastal wetlands is becoming increasingly apparent in the face of climate change and sea-level rise. 

Seminars will consider how the range of ecosystem services derived from coastal wetlands can be maintained in the face of pressures such as environmental change, through an understanding of the ecological processes and functions operating within these systems, relationships between functions and services across space and time, and the value placed by society on the goods and services derived from these systems. 

The seminar group will bring together researchers, policy-makers and user groups across the following areas: community ecology, conservation biology, ecosystem health, GIS and spatial data analysis, environmental justice, environmental economics, human geography, marine biology and social policy.  The researchers will investigate the potential contribution of existing methods from these disciplines to sustaining future ecosystem services, and also explore the scope for developing new interdisciplinary techniques.  The seminar group comprises researchers from the Universities of York, East Anglia and Aberdeen and Plymouth Marine Laboratory, together with representatives of key policy and stakeholder groups at both national and regional/local scales.  It will also benefit from the inclusion of three experienced international collaborators, from the United States, Canada and Germany.  Six seminars will be held over 2 years, and all seminars will be two-day events.  One day of each of the ‘regional’ seminars at Aberdeen, Plymouth and Norwich will consider the issues surrounding the sustainability of future ecosystem services at the regional scale, including a field visit where appropriate, to provide an opportunity for the seminar group to engage with policy-related, NGO and stakeholder groups locally.  This will provide researchers with first-hand experience of specific issues and complexities in management and conservation at a local scale and help to build mutual trust and understanding between researchers from different institutions and disciplines, and between researchers and user groups.  An executive summary of the proceedings of each seminar will be published on this web site, and 2-3 review papers will be published in international journals.