PARAMO - Provisioning of ecosystem services And cultuRAl values in the MOntane tropics
Lead Research Organisation:
Lancaster University
Department Name: Lancaster Environment Centre
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Planned Impact
Who will benefit from this research?
This project has access to extensive resources for dissemination to end users (see Pathways to Impact). Four UK and Colombian societal groups will benefit from the proposed research. (1) Conservation and cultural research bodies, NGOs, and environment policy-makers and assessment panels. (2) Rural Colombians in the páramo-cloudforest Andes. (3) Biology/Environmental and Arts and Humanities university students. (4) Members of the general public concerned about tropical forest loss and biodiversity extinction, plus those interested in birds.
How will they benefit from this research?
(1) Conservation and cultural research bodies, NGOs, and environment policy-makers and assessment panels. To develop a sustainable bioeconomy underpinned by culturally sensitive natural resource management, environmental funders and managers need two core pieces of information that this project will provide: (i) an understanding of the link between biodiversity, resulting ecosystem functioning, and the flows of ecosystem services to people; and (ii) how people culturally value to their natural environment.
Our principal collaborators in Colombia are at the Instituto Alexander von Humboldt (IaVH), which is funded by the Colombian government to research the nation's biological resources, their social influence, and their management. Several major UK- and Colombia-based NGOs, including WWF-Colombia, World Land Trust, Conservación Internacional, and ProAves (in)directly invest in the protection and/or purchase of critical areas for conservation in the Colombian Andes. Our research will inform both groups. Finally, UK and Colombian governments have made international agreement under the Convention of Biological Diversity 2011-2020 'Aichi Biodiversity Targets' to reduce extinction threat, and in doing so, meet SDG15 'Life on Land'. As a hotspot of extinction risk and ecosystem service losses, the Tropical Andes must be a focus of efforts, requiring international collaboration. In this respect, we will link our study to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), so that our results can feed into future regional and global assessments of the impacts of land degradation.
(2) Rural Colombians in the páramo-cloudforest Andes. Using this information, natural resource managers will be able to help improve poor rural Colombian people's lives by protecting or restoring core environmental services from which people benefit. Benefits could flow via direct financial mechanisms to protect natural habitat, such a carbon-based payments for ecosystems services (which our previous research in the Colombian Andes has quantified), reduced flood and landslide risk, and maintenance of key cultural values and human well-being.
(3) Colombian (BSc or MSc) and UK (BSc) students will gain opportunities to develop core transferable skills in data handling and manipulation techniques, plus experience of data collection during fieldwork and workshops. Further, Colombian students will gain international links that will benefit their career progressions.
(4) UK and Colombian general public. Many in the UK and Colombian wider general public are interested in or concerned about biodiversity conservation issues and climate change, and will benefit from the project's media engagement, as well as its capacity for wider public engagement in these issues, especially by bringing previously unheard community voices into the public discourse. Further, there is significant interest around birds, in terms of locations, records, and sound recordings.
This project has access to extensive resources for dissemination to end users (see Pathways to Impact). Four UK and Colombian societal groups will benefit from the proposed research. (1) Conservation and cultural research bodies, NGOs, and environment policy-makers and assessment panels. (2) Rural Colombians in the páramo-cloudforest Andes. (3) Biology/Environmental and Arts and Humanities university students. (4) Members of the general public concerned about tropical forest loss and biodiversity extinction, plus those interested in birds.
How will they benefit from this research?
(1) Conservation and cultural research bodies, NGOs, and environment policy-makers and assessment panels. To develop a sustainable bioeconomy underpinned by culturally sensitive natural resource management, environmental funders and managers need two core pieces of information that this project will provide: (i) an understanding of the link between biodiversity, resulting ecosystem functioning, and the flows of ecosystem services to people; and (ii) how people culturally value to their natural environment.
Our principal collaborators in Colombia are at the Instituto Alexander von Humboldt (IaVH), which is funded by the Colombian government to research the nation's biological resources, their social influence, and their management. Several major UK- and Colombia-based NGOs, including WWF-Colombia, World Land Trust, Conservación Internacional, and ProAves (in)directly invest in the protection and/or purchase of critical areas for conservation in the Colombian Andes. Our research will inform both groups. Finally, UK and Colombian governments have made international agreement under the Convention of Biological Diversity 2011-2020 'Aichi Biodiversity Targets' to reduce extinction threat, and in doing so, meet SDG15 'Life on Land'. As a hotspot of extinction risk and ecosystem service losses, the Tropical Andes must be a focus of efforts, requiring international collaboration. In this respect, we will link our study to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), so that our results can feed into future regional and global assessments of the impacts of land degradation.
(2) Rural Colombians in the páramo-cloudforest Andes. Using this information, natural resource managers will be able to help improve poor rural Colombian people's lives by protecting or restoring core environmental services from which people benefit. Benefits could flow via direct financial mechanisms to protect natural habitat, such a carbon-based payments for ecosystems services (which our previous research in the Colombian Andes has quantified), reduced flood and landslide risk, and maintenance of key cultural values and human well-being.
(3) Colombian (BSc or MSc) and UK (BSc) students will gain opportunities to develop core transferable skills in data handling and manipulation techniques, plus experience of data collection during fieldwork and workshops. Further, Colombian students will gain international links that will benefit their career progressions.
(4) UK and Colombian general public. Many in the UK and Colombian wider general public are interested in or concerned about biodiversity conservation issues and climate change, and will benefit from the project's media engagement, as well as its capacity for wider public engagement in these issues, especially by bringing previously unheard community voices into the public discourse. Further, there is significant interest around birds, in terms of locations, records, and sound recordings.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Jos Barlow (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Correa D
(2022)
Geographic patterns of tree dispersal modes in Amazonia and their ecological correlates
in Global Ecology and Biogeography
Edwards FA
(2021)
Sparing land for secondary forest regeneration protects more tropical biodiversity than land sharing in cattle farming landscapes.
in Current biology : CB
Mills SC
(2023)
High sensitivity of tropical forest birds to deforestation at lower altitudes.
in Ecology
| Description | NG et al. published a paper in which analysis found strong evidence that vegetated hillsides can provide a cost-effective ecosystem service approach to mitigate economic losses due to landslides in one of the world's most landslide prone areas. FE et al., found that increasing farm intensity on existing farmland can allow the abandonment of some farmland, allowing forest to regrow and enormously benefitting biodiversity. Mills et al. found that biodiversity at lower to mid elevations in the Andes are more threatened by land-use change than species at higher altitudes |
| Exploitation Route | The findings from all papers are now being presented to policymakers via our partners at the Humboldt Institute, and by our Project Integration Coordinator HA. The findings in Grima et al., have been incorporated into the Colombian Ministry of Mines and Energy infrastructure strategy. The findings in FE et al., and Mills et al., are directly relevant to conservation NGOs in Colombia seeking more sustainable farming practices. The findings are also being presented at the ColombiaBio closing conference to partners, policymakers, and community leaders. |
| Sectors | Agriculture, Food and Drink,Energy,Environment |
| Description | The Colombian Mining and Energy Planning Unit (UPME) has incorporated the findings from Grima et al., - that secondary forests can be important in reducing the biological consequences of farming (via secondary sparing), and can cost-effectively protect critical infrastructure - into their long-term infrastructure planning strategy. UPME have also been provided with, and will make use of, the raw data that produced these findings. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2021 |
| Sector | Agriculture, Food and Drink,Energy,Environment |
| Impact Types | Societal,Policy & public services |
| Description | Research used by the Colombian Mining and Energy Planning Unit (UPME) in their infrastructure strategy |
| Geographic Reach | South America |
| Policy Influence Type | Contribution to a national consultation/review |
| Title | Biogeographic multispecies occupancy model (bMSOM) |
| Description | Hierarchical multispecies occupancy models partially-pool information across multiple species to improve inference about factors affecting occupancy as well as generating spatial predictions of species occurrence. While they were originally developed in the context of single or multisite datasets covering small spatial scales, they are increasingly applied across much larger regions that transcend major abiotic gradients and dispersal barriers. Incorporating spatial variation in occupancy is a significant problem in this context, due to the large number of species, each with varying spatial patterns of occupancy, and due to the difficulty in capturing some of these determinants of occupancy via environmental covariates. Our solution is to use pre-existing range information (in the form of range maps) to constrain occupancy to areas in which a species is known to exist and allow for generating spatial covariates such as distance to range margin. Specifically, range maps are used to crop out areas that are distant from a species range so that occupancy is treated as 0. Further, a covariate summarising range position allows for occupancy to drop off towards geographical range margins. The bMSOM generates dramatically better predictive performance than traditional MSOMs, while also reducing the computational overhead of fitting these models. It avoids the severe spatial biases in predictions that are generated by MSOMs and allows for principled species-specific inference, even for rarely or never-observed species. |
| Type Of Material | Biological samples |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The MS describing the method is currently available on bioArxiv, and associated code is on github. The manuscript that describes the method is in review at Ecology and Evolution, and there is currently one manuscript in prep. that makes use of this method. |
| URL | https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.05.467527v1 |
| Description | PARAMO Closing Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A one-day workshop for PARAMO team members. The purpose of the workshop was to review the project's research findings, to discuss the policy implications of those findings, and to discuss potential future research directions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |