Diogo Alagador

Universidade de Évora | uevora · 'Rui Nabeiro' Biodiversity Chair

Our proposal aims to systematize, analyze, synthesize and evaluate data on the evolution of environmental and socioeconomic changes in the Rio das Mortes watershed between 2000 and 2020. We hypothesize that increasing the availability of evidence-based information for social indicators , economic and environmental will form the bridges for the sustainable management of natural resources in agroecosystems at the watershed scale. To fill this gap we will systematize a database to promote the valuation of the natural capital of agroecosystems, map priority areas for ecological conservation and restoration, and indicate actions to promote transitions in compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). From this spatially explicit database for the region's municipalities, we will use socioeconomic and environmental models and evidence to investigate connections that threaten the sustainability of agroecosystems, put ecological services and biodiversity at risk. Finally, we will propose nature-based solutions for better ecosystem management and ecosystem restoration for the agroecoystems of the watershed. We are now seeking funding and partners interested in contributing to our project. Any help will be appreciated.

Short presentation: This project creates a new approach to understand and predict species potential distributions, gathering well-established ecological principles and an innovative geometric mathematical approach to determine species niches. The main advantage of this algorithm relies on the fact that it is independent from statistical fittings and does not require standardizations, making it flexible and widely applicable. It can also be used as a predictive tool, to track species distributions in response to environmental change. Main objective: We intend to address some of the known limitations of SDM, proposing a new technique that is threshold-independent, does not require absence data nor standardizations, produce easily interpretable results, and do not rely in any particular family of species response curve, and henceforth being independent from statistical fittings.

Biodiversity conservation is a crisis discipline: it urges to find measures to reverse the effects of intense threats acting over biodiversity; it conflicts with dominant and competing socioeconomic activities; and it typically runs under tight budgets. Additionally, ecological and socioeconomic environments are tailored by dynamic processes turning analysis and decisions on conservation actions very complex. RECONCILE aims at addressing major and actual conservation problems with the ultimate goal of ensuring long-term persistence of species by reconciling conservation and socio-economy. To this end RECONCILE gathers experts from different areas such as ecology, conservation, mathematics, econometrics, computer and communication sciences. The ultimate goal is to provide conceptually-sound and efficient decision support-tools (ie. software) to assist optimized, long-term area prioritization in three wide-range problems issued in the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Every year, large investments in biodiversity conservation are made by governments, NGOs, and private sector but, given the current global funding crisis, the available resources should be carefully distributed in space and time, using a clear prioritization program. Therefore, novel conservation policies should: 1) be strategic and produce the greatest possible benefit for the money invested; 2) minimize conflicts with established socioeconomic activities; and 3) accommodate the pervasive impacts of global threats and processes, like climate change. Central to the credibility of such policies, conservation needs to be demonstrably efficient, transparent and accountable thus reinforcing the importance of systematic decision protocols and support tools to solve such non-trivial problems. CC impacts the geography of species and therefore intervenes with standard, static-based conservation practices that protect areas perpetually to abate the impacts of (local) threats to biodiversity. However, global stressors and strong human development call conservation planning to; 1) entangle dynamism and adaptiveness; 2) reduce as possible focal area and socioeconomic conflicts, and 3) act at wider spatial and temporal scales, in order to match the scale of global threats and to retrieve the best conservation outcomes with the least amount of investment. Problems such as: -Where and when to efficiently prioritize conservation actions to abate climate change impacts on species distributions? -How to optimally integrate cooperation opportunities between countries in order to establish effective cross-border climate-change-concern conservation plans? -How to quantify trade-offs between socioeconomic and conservation returns (ie. a reconciliation index) under climate change? need to be considered at continental-to-global levels and fully integrated by countries in order to fulfill their international commitments (eg. Aichi targets). RECONCILE outputs will contribute to scientifically support such decisions at wide geographic scales.