Evangelia Drakou

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Harokopio University of Athens

European islands are hotspots of biological and cultural diversity, which, compared to mainland, are more vulnerable to climate change, tourism development, uncontrolled land-use changes and the consequences of financial crisis. These drivers of change have increasingly resulted in severe impacts on socio-economic and environmental parameters. Proj...

Οι αιτίες αλλαγών στις χρήσεις γης μεταβάλλονται στο χώρο και το χρόνο και μπορεί να προκύπτουν από βιοφυσικούς και κοινωνικοοικονομικούς παράγοντες, η μελέτη των οποίων συχνά απαιτεί τη χρήση μοντέλων προσομοίωσης (Noszczyk 2019). Τα χωρικά συγκεκριμένα μοντέλα αλλαγών χρήσεων γης χρησιμοποιούνται για την κατανόηση και την ποσοτικοποίηση βασικών δ...

Medicinal plants and their bioactive molecules are integral components of nature and have supported the health of human societies for millennia. However, the prevailing view of medicinal biodiversity solely as an ecosystem-decoupled natural resource of commercial value prevents people from fully benefiting from the capacity of nature to provide med...

We explore the requirements for adapting coastal protection EU-wide indicators nationally. The aim of this research is threefold: (a) to map coastal protection at the national level; (b) to assess the congruence between the regional and national coastal protection estimates; and (c) to qualitatively assess the congruence of our findings with subnat...

Coastal environments are a transition zone between the land and the open sea, that gather different habitat types and support human activities. Total Suspended Matter (TSM), which reaches the coastal zones via rivers and streams, is one of the main water quality indicators. Ιt is comprised of organic and inorganic constituents, like phytoplankton a...

Understanding and quantifying ES flows is essential for the sustainable management of social-ecological systems, as it directly captures the human-nature interactions within the system and not solely its individual elements. Especially in degrading marine systems, most ES assessments focus solely on either biophysical or socio-economic elements of...

The human footprint on the global ocean is ever-increasing, particularly with new ways to grow food in the ocean, new technologies in marine energy production as a way to resolve climate change, and transport and commerce expanding across the ocean. Yet, human activities in the ocean have long been managed using a sectoral approach (e.g., fisheries...

Global frameworks to guide consistent monitoring of changes in human–nature interactions across space and time are needed to better understand how healthy ecosystems support societies and to inform policy design. Monitoring Essential Ecosystem Service Variables (EESVs) can provide a comprehensive picture of how links between nature and people are c...

The Working Group on Resilience and Marine Ecosystem Services (WGRMES) aims to improve scientific understanding and capacity to design data collection networks and methodologies in order to analyze the ecological, economic, social, and institutional dimensions of marine ecosystem services. The group progressed work in relation to five objectives:...

Adoption of sustainable agricultural practices (SAP) is essential for economic, social and environmental adaptation to climate change. For cash crops like Vietnamese coffee, this is even more relevant, since the country experiences climate change impacts, with direct implications for the well-being of smallholder farmers. Understanding the factors...

The state of nature is driving human activities, while human activities change the state of nature. These social‐ecological interactions have existed for millennia. Now in the Anthropocene ‐the acclaimed geological era in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment‐ many social‐ecological systems are under pressure...

Assessing, mapping and quantifying ecosystem services is a growing priority within local, national and international policy and decision-making processes. That requires robust and scientifically sound data and information on biodiversity, including ecological and socio-economic aspects that interact within the social-ecological systems. Ecosystem s...

To account for progress towards conservation targets, monitoring systems should capture not only information on biodiversity but also knowledge on the dynamics of ecological processes and the related effects on human well-being. Protected areas represent complex social-ecological systems with strong human-nature interactions. They are able to provi...

Social-ecological systems in the Mediterranean Basin are characterised by high biodiversity and a prolonged cultural influence, leading to the co-evolution of these systems. The unique characteristics of Mediterranean social-ecological systems, current pressures leading to a decline in ecosystem services, and the need for coordinated action are rec...

Decision makers are increasingly interested in information from ecosystem services (ES) assessments. Scientists have for long recognised the importance of selecting appropriate indicators. Yet, while the amount and variety of indicators developed by scientists seems to increase continuously, the extent to which the indicators truly inform decision...

Ecosystem service (ES) maps are instrumental for the assessment and communication of the costs and benefits of human-nature interactions. Yet, despite the increased understanding that we live a globalized tele-coupled world where such interactions extend globally, ES maps are usually place-based and fail to depict the global flows of locally produc...

The biodiversity and high productivity of coastal terrestrial and aquatic habitats are the foundation for important benefits to human societies around the world. These globally distributed habitats need frequent and broad systematic assessments, but field surveys only cover a small fraction of these areas. Satellite-based sensors can repeatedly rec...

We compared and contrasted 11 European case studies to identify challenges and opportunities toward the operationalization of marine and coastal ecosystem service (MCES) assessments in Europe. This work is the output of a panel convened by the Marine Working Group of the Ecosystem Services Partnership in September 2016. The MCES assessments were us...

Background Ecosystem services (ES) mapping is becoming mainstream in many sustainability assessments, but its impact on real world decision-making is still limited. Robustness, end-user relevance and transparency have been identified as key attributes needed for effective ES mapping. However, these requirements are not always met due to multiple ch...

The mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services, an initiative under the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020, sets the basis for national ecosystem assessments in EU Member States, including Greece. The highly diverse and heterogeneous Greek landscape provides multiple ecosystem services (ES) and benefits to society. However, the rich know...

The articles of this e-book enhance our knowledge of how management practices applied to agricultural systems affect the delivery of multiple ecosystem services and how trade-offs between provisioning, regulating, and supporting services can be handled both above- and belowground. They also show the diversity of topics that need to be considered wi...

This paper presents the establishment and the first outcomes of the Hellenic Ecosystem Services Partnership (HESP), a scientific-technical committee aiming at the guidance and coordination of the Ecosystem Services (ES) assessment in Greece. HESP consists of experts from different disciplines (ecology, marine biology, socio-ecological system scienc...

Local, regional, and global policies to manage protect and restore our oceans and coasts call for the inclusion of ecosystem services (ES) in policy-relevant research. Marine and coastal ES and the associated benefits to humans are usually assessed, quantified, and mapped at the ecosystem level to inform policy and decision-making. Yet those benefi...

As the environmental issues facing our planet change, scientific efforts need to inform the sustainable management of marine resources by adopting a socio-ecological systems approach. Taking the symposium on “Understanding marine socio-ecological systems: including the human dimension in Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (MSEAS)” as an opportunity w...

Section 7.9 E-book: https://ab.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=12837&display_type=list&element_type=1

In the EU, the mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services, abbreviated to MAES, is seen as a key action for the advancement of biodiversity objectives, and also to inform the development and implementation of related policies on water, climate, agriculture, forest, marine and regional planning. In this study, we present the development...

Cultural ecosystem services are defined by people's perception of the environment, which make them hard to quantify systematically. Methods to describe cultural benefits from ecosystems typically include resource-demanding survey techniques, which are not suitable to assess cultural ecosystem services for large areas. In this paper we explore a met...

Plurality in ecosystem service definitions and applications has resulted in a wide variety of methods to assess and map ecosystem services (ES). Although this helped the field to progress and evolve in several directions and contexts, this diversity challenges the mainstreaming of ES information into policy making, natural resource management and g...

A plurality in methods, models, terminologies is used to assess, quantify, map and communicate ecosystem services (ES). The Thematic Working Groups on Mapping (TWG4) and Modeling ES (TWG5) of the Ecosystem Service Partnership (ESP), recent literature and expert workshops, have highlighted the need for developing a platform that systematically organ...

The second MAES report presents indicators that can be used at European and Member State's level to map and assess biodiversity, ecosystem condition and ecosystem services according to the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES v4.3). This work is based on a review of data and indicators available at national and European...

The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) is conceived around a set of interacting Critical Biodiversity Informatics Infrastructures (databases, web modelling services, broadcasting services, ...) hosted at different institutions, including the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre...

PRISMA checklist [1] applied to this review paper. (DOC)

Compilation of terms used in the literature to refer to each marine and coastal ecosystem service (MCES). No examples (and, therefore, no synonyms) were found for weather regulation. (DOC)

List of indicators and units found during the systematic review of published marine and coastal ecosystem service (MCES) assessments. Indicators are classified following the cascade model into capacity, flow and benefit (see section 2.4 and fig. 2). (DOC)

Research on ecosystem services has grown exponentially during the last decade. Most of the studies have focused on assessing and mapping terrestrial ecosystem services highlighting a knowledge gap on marine and coastal ecosystem services (MCES) and an urgent need to assess them. We reviewed and summarized existing scientific literature related to M...

Human health and well-being presuppose environmental quality. Several studies have documented the indicative role of land use types in environmental quality. However, the exact role of land use composition on disease distribution has remained scientifically vague. We assessed the congruence of diseases' distribution with land use composition, focus...

The Natura 2000 network was established across the European Union's (EU) Member States with the aim to conserve biodiversity, while ensuring the sustainability of human activities. However, to what kind and to what extent Natura 2000 sites are subject to human activities and how this varies across Member States remains unspecified. Here, we analyze...

Indicators for mapping ecosystem services: a review

Recent decades have seen significant steps in the longstanding scientific, philosophical and political debates concerning the relationship between society and nature towards a more ‘human-in-nature’ view in biodiversity conservation. This progress has been reflected in both prominent scientific publications and several policy documents. However, th...

Mainstreaming ecosystem services into policy and decision making is dependent on the availability of spatially explicit information on the state and trends of ecosystems and their services. In particular, the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 addresses the need to account for ecosystem services through biophysical mapping and valuation. This paper...

We investigated the potential associations of habitat type richness patterns with a series of environmental variables in 61 protected aquatic ecosystems of the Greek Natura 2000 network. Habitat type classification followed the Natura 2000 classification scheme. Habitat type richness was measured as the number of different habitat types in an area....

Abstract – We examined the relative contribution of environmental heterogeneity and dispersal limitation on freshwater fish community composition in 18 Greek protected lakes and reservoirs. Environmental heterogeneity was measured by spatial pattern metrics (calculated by digital map processing, e.g., patch richness density, area-weighted mean patc...

We compared reservoirs that were proposed to be included in the Greek Natura 2000 network of protected sites, with natural lakes and rivers from the same network. We analyzed landscape spatial pattern, habitat type composition, and spatial pattern of human activities. We found that the landscapes of reservoirs are distinct from those of rivers a...