Title:	Decision support for biodiversity management in landscapes
DNr:	NAISS 2024/22-349
Project Type:	NAISS Small Compute
Principal Investigator:	Annie Jonsson <annie.jonsson@his.se>
Affiliation:	Högskolan i Skövde
Duration:	2024-03-04 – 2025-04-01
Classification:	10611
Keywords:

Abstract

Losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services can lead to major socio-economic costs. Many authorities, agencies and companies therefore work to integrate impact on ecosystem services in their risk assessments or in their business development plans. However, the available decision support tools today are not sufficient. In this project we develop and evaluate a landscape biodiversity capacity index. The index will be based on landscape area, heterogeneity and connectivity using data derived from a combination of land cover data, ecological theory, empirical research and ecological expertise. The index can be use as decision support by demonstrate how the landscape's ability to maintain biodiversity is influenced by various interventions in the landscape structure. The index combines measures of landscape heterogeneity using a simple diversity index, that is Simpson´s index, and landscape functional connectivity. To compute landscape functionality we will calculate the dominant eigenvalues of biotope matrices that model the ability of the biotopes to support populations of focal species. To evaluate the index functionality we test the index for different synthetic landscapes with specified structures generated by an algorithm that uses spectral methods and fast Fourier transformation. We will also test and run calculations on empirical landscapes collected from national databases or provided by stakeholders we collaborate with.