Inger Elisabeth Måren

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Bergen

Successional dynamics in plant community assembly may result from both deterministic and stochastic ecological processes. The relative importance of different ecological processes is expected to vary over the successional sequence, between different plant functional groups, and with the disturbance levels and land-use management regimes of the succ...

Millennia of human land-use have resulted in the widespread occurrence of what have been coined ‘domesticated ecosystems’. The anthropogenic imprints on diversity, composition, structure and functioning of such systems are well documented. However, evolutionary consequences of human activities in these ecosystems are enigmatic. Calluna vulgaris (L....

In developing countries, the landscape surrounding agricultural land is important for maintaining biodiversity and providing ecosystem services. Forests provide a full suite of goods and services to subsistence farmers in the Himalayan agro-ecological system. The effects of biomass outtake on woody species richness and composition were analysed in...

Questions: How do species composition and abundance of soil seed bank and standing vegetation vary over the course of a post-fire succession in northern heathlands? What is the role of seed banks – do they act as a refuge for early successional species or can they simply be seen as a spillover from the extant local vegetation? Location: Coastal Cal...

Semi‐natural habitats have been shaped by human disturbance regimes for centuries. Spatially and temporally heterogeneous land‐use practices, such as cutting, burning, grazing and turf‐cutting, have resulted in complex mosaic landscapes that are of high priority for conservation in Europe. Contemporary conservation subjects these systems to managem...

Place-based social-ecological research is crucial for understanding local sustainability challenges. However, lack of transferability of insights to other locations and to larger scales remains challenging. In this paper, we present a novel transdisciplinary learning framework that links notions of cultural heritage, landscape, and social-ecologica...

UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) are pivotal for studying and fostering sustainable interactions between people and nature. In this study, a public participatory geographical information system (PPGIS) approach was employed targeting key stakeholders across the 12 Portuguese BRs, to map their place-based perception over Nature’s Contributions to Peo...

Background The global population is increasingly aging, imposing a substantial burden on social and healthcare systems as aging is associated with gradual muscle wasting and functional decline. Consumption of protein-rich foods, such as livestock-based meat, providing high-quality proteins can prevent muscle wasting and related functional decline i...

The Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere Reserve encompasses a heterogeneous landscape which provides numerous ecosystem services. Semi-natural grasslands provide forage for traditionally managed livestock and are important sources of nectar and pollen for pollinators. However, these services are not evenly distributed due to different biotic and abiotic...

Humans have significantly modified the planet's ecosystems with negative consequences for biodiversity and human wellbeing. However, not all land use is equal, and many traditional land uses, and emergent cultural landscapes support important biodiversity and provide multiple benefits to society. Despite their importance, cultural landscapes are th...

In Western Norway, farmers have traditionally used fire as a management tool in coastal heathlands to enhance the fodder quality for livestock. Rotational prescribed burning increases landscape heterogeneity by creating a mosaic of different regeneration stages of heather. Ground beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) responses to fire in traditionally man...

Generating actionable knowledge to meet current sustainability challenges requires unprecedented collaboration across scales, geographies, cultures and knowledges. Intergovernmental programmes and place‐based knowledge–action networks have much potential to mobilize sustainability transformation. Although many research fields have benefited from re...

Context: Consumers are increasingly encouraged to reduce meat and dairy consumption. However, few meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on the effect of reducing meat and/or dairy on (absolute) protein intake, anthropometric values, and body composition are available. Objective: The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis...

Responses to climate change have often been found to lag behind the rate of warming that has occurred. In addition to dispersal limitation potentially restricting spread at leading range margins, the persistence of species in new and unsuitable conditions is thought to be responsible for apparent time‐lags. Soil seed banks can allow plant communiti...

Ecosystem services (ESs) play an important role in sustainable landscape management. People value ESs in diverse ways encompassing social and ecological domains and we need to bring these different values together. We used social-cultural and biophysical methods to map a diverse set of ESs at two spatial scales in a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in Norw...

Governance of ecosystem services (ES) requires an understanding of the complex dynamics of collaboration (and contestation) of multiple stakeholders and multiple ES. However, many studies consider only a few ES or stakeholder groups. In our work, we map the co-production of multiple ES by multiple stakeholders connected through ES governance networ...

The COVID-19 pandemic fully exposed the vulnerability of the global agri-food system to shocks and stresses, highlighting the need for transformation and action to make it more resilient and inclusive. This paper offers a unique insight into the global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic by examining impacts and responses in the agri-food sector within...

In this report, we summarize the current state of knowledge and best estimates of how climate change is expected to impact Norwegian forest ecosystems from now to the year 2100

Import of roughage to Norway may introduce novel plant pests, invasive plants and disease-causing pathogens to both animals and humans. However, there is a high level of uncertainty behind these conclusions.

Scientific Opinion of the panel on Alien Organisms and Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). ISBN: 978-82-8259-382-3, ISSN: 2535-4019. Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment (VKM), Oslo, Norway.

Background From the worldwide youth-led climate strikes of 2018–2019 to the student-initiated austerity protests in Chile in 2019, it is undeniable that young people have been protagonists in pressuring for social change towards greater sustainability in recent years. This piece reflects on youth as agents of social-ecological change, and what rese...

Making the right decisions for sustainable development requires sound knowledge of the values and spatial distribution of the services co‐produced by ecosystems and people. UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere programme and associated Biosphere Reserves (BRs) are key learning sites or model regions for sustainable development providing key entry points f...

Carnation SHD-27531-4 is a genetically modified variety of Dianthus caryophyllus L. used as a decorative plant species. The red-purple colour of the flowers results from expression of the two newly introduced genes dfr and f 3’5’h, encoding the enzymes dihydroflavonol 4reductase (DFR) and flavonoid 3’,5’-hydroxylase (F3’5’H). The two enzymes enable...

Forests have a prominent role to play in the success of the UN’s Agenda 2030, thus actions to halt deforestation are high on the international sustainability agenda. As humans are altering the composition and extent of forest ecosystems, from local to global scales, we are also affecting the provisioning of forest ecosystem goods and services. We t...

Young stakeholders are key actors in social-ecological systems, who have the capacity to be agents of sustainability transformation but are also at high risk of exclusion in the unfolding of global change challenges. Despite the focus of sustainability on future generations, there has been little research effort aimed at understanding young actors’...

The term ‘sustainability’ is vague and open to interpretation. In this paper we analyze how firms use the term in an effort to make the concept their own, and how it becomes a premise for further decisions, by applying a bottom-up approach focusing on the interpretation of ‘sustainability’ in the Norwegian salmon-farming industry. The study is base...

Aim Climate and land use are key determinants of biodiversity, with past and ongoing changes posing serious threats to global ecosystems. Unlike most other organism groups, plant species can possess dormant life‐history stages such as soil seed banks, which may help plant communities to resist or at least postpone the detrimental impact of global c...

ISBN: 978-82-8259-344-1 ISSN: 2535-4019

Opinion piece in ENSIA- a solutions-focused nonprofit media outlet reporting on our changing planet

Assessment of the risk to Norwegian biodiversity from import of wrasses and other cleaner fish for use in aquaculture. Opinion of the Panel on Alien Organisms and Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment. VKM report 2019: 15, ISBN: 978-82-8259-330-4, ISSN: 2535-4019. Norwegian Scientific Com...

As a teacher, I am expected to engage in an interactive teaching style, engaging the students in varied learning activities, including class discussion facilitated by the use of the white board, group reflections, step-wise quizzes and think-pair-share discussions, and other various strategies promoting active learning (Holmes et al. 2015). The rea...

Report from the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment (VKM) 2019. Opinion of the Panel on Alien Organisms and Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment

Scientific opinion of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment (VKM)

The United Nation’s (UN) 3rd Annual Multi-stakeholder Forum on ‘Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (STI Forum) - Transformation Towards Sustainable and Resilient Societies’ was held at the UN Headquarters in New York on 5th and 6th of June, 2018. This STI Forum set out to discuss a suit of the sustainable devel...

Legal protection has been used as means of conserving forests and associated biodiversity in many regions of the world since the eighteenth century. However, most forests in the global south, even those within protected areas, are influenced by human activities. Himalayan forests harbour much of the biodiversity of the region, maintain subsistence...

Spatial variation in tree-regeneration density is attributed to the specialization of tree species to light availability for germination and growth. Light availability, in turn, varies across the gap-understorey mosaic. Canopy gaps provide an important habitat for the regeneration of tree species that would otherwise be suppressed in the understory...

Communities reliant on subsistence and small-scale production are typically more vulnerable than others to disasters such as earthquakes. We study the earthquakes that struck Nepal in the spring of 2015 to investigate their impacts on smallholder communities and the diverse trajectories of recovery at the household and community levels. We focus on...

In Spring 2015, a series of earthquakes and aftershocks struck Nepal. The earthquakes caused significant changes in labor and land availability, cash income needs, and land quality. We examine how these post-earthquake impacts converged with ongoing agricultural shifts. Earthquake-related socio-economic and landscape changes specifically motivate t...

Highly variable water regimes, such as California's, contain distinctive problems in the pursuit of secure timing, quantities and distributions of highly variable flows. Their formal and informal systems of water control must adapt rapidly to forceful and unpredictable swings on which the survival of diversified ecosystems, expansive settlement pat...

Communities reliant on subsistence and small-scale production are typically more vulnerable than others to disasters such as earthquakes. We study the earthquakes that struck Nepal in the spring of 2015 to investigate their impacts on smallholder communities and the diverse trajectories of recovery at the household and community levels. We focus on...

The 2015 earthquakes caused approximately 9,000 deaths, 23,000 injuries and the destruction of more than 600,000 family homes. ● We conducted a study in Dolakha District to assess the multidimensional impacts of the 2015 earthquakes on small farmer communities and households. ● We asked: (1) What were the impacts from the earthquakes to small farm...

Environmental disasters, such as hurricanes, landslides, and earthquakes, are pervasive and disproportionately affect rural and poor populations. The concept of resilience is typically used in disaster scenarios to describe how a community or person is able to “bounce back” from a disaster event. At the same time, resilience theory also contends th...

p class="Default"> Balancing the trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service delivery is a colossal challenge in the areas of the globe with high productivity and high demand, such as in south Asia. In order to meet this challenge, we need enhanced knowledge of the species constituting these semi-natural systems. This paper r...

The UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs Programme is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2017. Today, there are more than 700 UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks around the world, and more than 170 of these specialise in the fields covered by the Natural Sciences Sector of UNESCO. They provide a unique scientific expertise in the United Nations context and signif...

Summary ● The 2015 earthquakes caused approximately 9,000 deaths, 23,000 injuries and the destruction of more than 600,000 family homes. ● We conducted a study in Dolakha District to assess the multidimensional impacts of the 2015 earthquakes on small farmer communities and households. ● We asked: (1) What were the impacts from the earthquakes to s...

Habitat loss is one of the primary environmental causes of biodiversity decline across scales; locally to globally. Ecological restoration is acknowledged as an important tool to counteract this negative trend. The semi-natural calcareous sand dune meadows in south-western Norway are known for their high species diversity, much like similar habitat...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Figure S1: Database schema. Diversity data in yellow, GIS data in green and Catalogue of Life data in blue. The diversity tables datasource, study, site, measuredtaxon and diversitymeasurement follow the structure described in ‘Methods’ in the main text and in Hudson et al. (2014): a datasource is associated with one or more study records, each of...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Questions Do composition and richness of woody plants differ between gaps and closed canopy in subtropical forests, and does this difference vary across life stages of tree species? Is tree species richness in gaps a function of regeneration density? Location Subtropical Shorea robusta Gaertn (Sal) forest, central Nepal. Methods We collected vege...

Soil seed banks offer plants the possibility to disperse through time. This has implications for population and community dynamics, as recognised by ecological and evolutionary theory. In contrast, the conservation and restoration literature often find seed banks to be depauperate, weedy and without much conservation value or restoration potential....

Human population growth in the developing world drives land-use changes, impacting food security. In India, the dramatic change in demographic dynamics over the past century has reduced traditional agricultural land-use through increasing commercialization. Here, we analyze the magnitude and implications for the farming system by the introduction o...

An understanding of the differences in vegetation and soil characteristics between slope aspects in high altitude semiarid environments is fundamentally important for efficient management of these seminatural systems; however, few studies have quantified these differences. Here, we analyzed forest stand characteristics, carbon stocks and soil prope...

Background & aim: One of the central ideas in contemporary ecology is that disturbance plays an important role in natural communities, influencing population persistence, community composition, and maintenance of diversity. Human-induced disturbances repeated throughout centuries have shaped the semi-natural habitats surrounding us today. The coast...

Monitoring of the ecological efficiency of different restoration and mitigation measures is important to inform decision-making but can be challenging, especially in remote and low-resource settings. Species composition of the vegetation is sensitive to environmental variation, and can thus be used in restoration assessment, but this requires stati...

Although protected areas are central to global biodiversity conservation, most land lies within unprotected areas. In the developing world forest habitats have received increased attention for their potential as carbon sinks in a climate change perspective, and only few of these forests fall within protected areas. This study assesses how various m...

The ecotone, the spatial transition zone between two vegetation communities, is claimed to have more species than the adjoining communities. However, empirical studies do not always confirm higher richness at the ecotone. The ecotone position and structure are dynamic over time and space and it is driven by the changes in climate, land use or their...

Abstract: Invasive plant species are exerting a serious threat to biological diversity in many regions of the world. To understand plant invasions this study aims to test which of the two plant invasiveness hypotheses; ‘low native diversity’ vs. ‘high native diversity’, is supported by the regional distribution patterns of invasive plant species in...

QuestionWhat is the impact of the fire cues smoke and ash on seed germination of important functional groups in the heathland system, namely ericads, herbs and graminoids? We predict that if germination from heathland seed banks is in part regulated by fire cues, there should be stronger responses to fire cue treatments in seed bank samples taken f...

Seminatural grasslands have long been shaped and maintained by human-induced fire and grazing regimes in order to utilise extensive land areas, not suitable for intensive cultivation, for the production of protein for human consumption. Changes in either management regimes have great implications for vegetation cover and composition. In this contex...

Background and AimsAcross their range, widely distributed species are exposed to a variety of climatic and other environmental conditions, and accordingly may display variation in life history strategies. For seed germination in cold climates, two contrasting responses to variation in winter temperature have been documented: first, an increased abi...

Biodiversity changes caused by anthropogenic disturbance through foliage removal (lopping) were studied in Quercus semecarpifolia Sm. (oak) dominated forests in Nepal. We studied the locations of Phulchoki (Kathmandu Valley) and Ghorepani (Annapurna Region). Alpha (α) diversity, gamma (γ) diversity and different estimates of beta (β) diversity of v...

Traditional coastal adaptation in western Norway was based on the combination of small scale fisheries and heathland farming. Man deliberately removed natural forests by the use of fire to create open Calluna-heathlands for the purpose of all-year-round grazing by sheep, goats and cattle. . Over the past four thousand years, this natural resource m...

The challenges of developing legal regimes for sustainable management of ecosystems and natural resources, capable of meeting the enormous pressure from an increasing world population and the demands on higher standard of living, and from the effects of climate change, is enormous. Traditional protection of ecosystems and areas, have to be combine...

Developing countries are home to much of the world’s biodiversity due to their location in areas of high species richness and their native vegetation has not yet been totally transformed by human activity. Enabling economic and social development to proceed whilst retaining the high environmental values is central to the principle of sustainability...

Use of plants as medicine has been practiced all over the world since the dawn of human civilisation. In the Himalayas, many medicinal plants yield essential ecosystem services/ benefits for the subsistence farmers, many of which grow in the forest ecosystem. However, documentation of traditional medicine and medicinal plants used by local communit...

Maintenance of biodiversity and other ecosystems services essential for human well-being requires an effective legal framework to prevent over-exploitation and give incentive for protection of biodiversity. There is uncertainty about what types of legal framework are most effective in different ecological, economic and cultural settings. Forest con...

The European coastal heathlands are important habitats for international conservation. Today, these low-intensity farming systems are threatened by the cessation of traditional management regimes, such as grazing and prescribed burning. In natural systems, the effects of fire on germination responses are often explained by adaptation to fire over e...

De menneskeskapte kystlyngheiene i Norge utgjør en tredjedel av det totale europeiske lyngheibeltet langs Atlanterhavskysten. Røsslyng er den dominerende planten. I Norge endrer kystlyngheiene karakter fra sør til nord, fra vest til øst og fra lavland til høgereliggende områder. Arter som er vare for kulde holder seg lengst i sør og vest, mens nord...

Anthropogenic use of fire, often in conjunction with grazing, is contributing to the creation and maintenance of semi-natural ecosystems on marginal lands world-wide, e.g. the African savannas and the Australian kwongan. The European coastal heathlands are important habitats for international conservation. Today, these low-intensity farming systems...