This year's field trip to Transylvania organized by the Saxon State Office for Environment, Agriculture and Geology (LfULG) united German and Romanian expertise to raise awareness for biodiversity and its importance for ecological engineering and sustainable land use. Through discussions on agricultural multifunctionality...

  Having collected a large amount of highly valuable ecological data, the time had come for our researchers to get together and set up strategies how to best use this wealth of information creating high-quality joint scientific publications. Therefore, on the 9th & 10th of January 2018, fourteen colleagues from a...

A field trip organized by the Saxon State Office for Environment, Agriculture and Geology (LfULG) aimed at bringing together farmers and practitioners from Germany with local ones in Romania. The trip was organized as part of STACCATO’s objective to assess ecosystem services and compare agricultural practices across Eur...

Central to the STACCATO activities is the field sampling, which began in spring 2017 with all partners being very ambitious and ready to start. Now, field work is nearly finished and the data acquisition was very successful in most countries. In Bulgaria, autumn 2016 and spring 2017 were exceptionally dry, which hampered the ...

The Centre for Environmental and Climate Research at Lund University announces multiple positions related to ecosystem service and climate research: Associate Senior University Lecturer in Ecological-Economic Modelling: https://lu.mynetworkglobal.com/en/what:job/jobID:156455/type:job/where:4/apply:1 Five postdocs...

Field sampling is an essential part within the STACCATO project. This spring our scientists have been working around selected sites across Europe to provide essential information on key ecosystem services in more or less agriculturally dominated landscapes and their correlation to local biodiversity. In all 5 participatin...

A new article "When natural habitat fails to enhance biological pest control – Five hypotheses" published in Biological Consevation identifies five hypotheses for when and why natural habitat can fail to support biological pest control. Abstract: Ecologists and farmers often have contrasting perce...

Sofia, Bulgaria was the host of a two-day conference "Mapping and assessment of ecosystem services - science in action", organized by the EEA-funded project "Methodological Support for Ecosystem Services Mapping and Biophysical Valuation" (MetEcoSMap). The event, which took place on 6 and 7 February, broug...

The international scientific conference "Mapping and assessment of ecosystem services - science in action" aims to bring together researchers from different countries to discuss the scientific aspects of mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services. It will be focused on the methods for mapping ...

In the period of 22-25th of August, Sapientia University hosted a major workshop organized within the international transdisciplinary project ‘Sustaining agricultural change through ecological engineering and optimal use of ecosystem services’ (acronym: STACCATO), which is coordinated by the Helmholtz Centre for E...

In this introductory video, filmed during the Kick-off meting in Sofia, Bulgaria, project coordinator Prof. Josef Settele, explains what STACCATO is and what are its future objectives and plans. "I am quite optimistic that we will come up with some nice results in relation to ecological engineering, which is how to d...

As part of the new 6th Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6) UNEP has just released a separate Assessment for the pan-European region. The report provides an overview on the current state, trends and an outlook for the environment, and also highlights environmental factors that contribute to human health and well-being at the re...

Despite the many important values, traditional knowledge types and skills related to the management of trees on farmland are sharply eroding, even in the traditional rural communities such are those from Transylvania. Reasons are multiple, but the most important are related to the formal institutional regulations, which de-co...

In order to advance the sustainability in long-term development of agro-ecosystemsSTACCATO ("SusTainable AgriCultural ChAnge Through ecological engineering and Optimal use of natural resources") plans to quantify the sensitivity of ecosystem functions and the generated services to environmental pressures in rep...

Assessments of ecosystem services (ES), aiming at informing decisions on land management, are increasing in number around the globe, but only in a few cases recommendations are then applied by decision-makers in real life. In a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Society a team of researchers aims to brid...

The BiodivERsA network has released its new report Analysis of the outputs of BiodivERsA funded projects.This publication presents the academic and society/ policy relevant outputs of 12 pan-European research projects focused on "Biodiversity: linking scientific advancement to policy and practice". Th...