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Working paper A group of 20 international colleagues reflect on how to invite care into productive, creative spaces without being physically together.

This work is based on a workshop funded by iDiv via the German Research Foundation (DFG FZT 118 and 202548816). National and local governments need to step up efforts to effectively implement the post-2020 global biodiversity framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity to halt and reverse worsening biodiversity trends. Drawing on recent advances in interdisciplinary biodiversity science, we propose a framework for improved implementation by national and subnational governments. First, the identification of actions and the promotion of ownership across stakeholders need to recognize the multiple values of biodiversity and account for remote responsibility. Second, cross-sectorial implementation and mainstreaming should adopt scalable and multifunctional ecosystem restoration approaches and target positive futures for nature and people. Third, assessment of progress and adaptive management can be informed by novel biodiversity monitoring and modeling approaches handling the multidimensionality of biodiversity change. Publisher PDF

While forest management strongly influences biodiversity, it remains unclear how the structural and compositional changes caused by management affect different community dimensions (e.g. richness, specialisation, abundance or completeness) and how this differs between taxa. We assessed the effects of nine forest features (representing stand structure, heterogeneity, and tree composition) on thirteen above‐ and belowground trophic groups of plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria in 150 temperate forest plots differing in their management type. Canopy cover decreased light resources, which increased community specialisation but reduced overall diversity and abundance. Features increasing resource types and diversifying microhabitats (admixing of oaks and conifers) were important and mostly affected richness. Belowground groups responded differently to those aboveground and had weaker responses to most forest features. Our results show that we need to consider forest features rather than broad management types and highlight the importance of considering several groups and community dimensions to better inform conservation.

Riparian zones are the interface between aquatic and terrestrial systems along inland watercourses. They have a disproportionate ecological role in the landscape considering their narrow extent, which makes them a good example of small natural features (sensu Hunter, 2017-inthisissue). Characteristically, riparian zones increase species richness in the landscape and provide key services to society, such as soil fertility, water purification, and recreation. Despite the recognized importance of riparian zones for ecological, economic and social reasons, and the vast amount of scientific literature exploring measures for their conservation, current management is still failing at enabling a proper ecological functioning of these areas. The best practices for conservation of riparian zones have mostly focused on manipulating biotic and physical components (e.g. renaturalizing flow regimes, improving channel mobility, and controlling invasions of exotic ecosystem engineer species). However, these strategies face important technical, socio-economic, and legal constraints that require a more integrative approach for effective conservation. In this paper we summarize the main problems affecting riparian zones and their current management challenges. Following Hunter et al. (2017-inthisissue), we review novel approaches to conservation of riparian zones, complementary to manipulating processes that reflect contemporary management and policy. These include (1) investing in environmental education for both local people and technical staff, (2) guaranteeing qualitative and long term inventories and monitoring, (3) establishing legislation and solutions to protect riparian zones, (4) framing economic activities in riparian zones under sustainable management, and (5) planning restoration of riparian zones at multiple and hierarchical spatio-temporal scales.

How can assessments of multiple ecosystem services intelligently analyze interconnected ecosystem services. When carrying out ecosystem service assessments to determine and understand bundles of ecosystem services it is vital to consider 4 key areas that will aid in the understanding, practicality, reliability, and comparability of the study: 1) Ecosystem service bundle dynamics and characteristics will depend on what indicators are used, and what part of the ecosystem service production chain they represent (production potential/supply, use/demand, value/need); 2) Drivers and their interactions influence ecosystem service bundle dynamics and configurations at different points in the ecosystem service production chain; 3) Issues of scale–in terms of spatial extent, temporal scale, social organization and the resolution of analysis; 4) ecosystem service bundles are more than the sum of their parts, and are also an expression of an emergent dynamics of the social-ecological system that produces them.

This talk will provide a summary of the ongoing PECS working group on "Social-ecological dynamics of ecosystem services". The working group has brought together researchers representing regional case studies that have investigated ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies within social-ecological units across different landscapes and seascapes. The initial aims were to: i) find typical patterns of trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services found across the studies; ii) identify shared types of bundles of ecosystem services and whether bundles can be understood as signatures of social-ecological systems; iii) select key drivers of the differences among bundles; and iv) find methods useful to identify ecosystem services, trade-offs, bundles, and drivers across different social-ecological contexts and the data needed to undertake such analyses. In this talk, I will focus on the application of the different methods and conceptual frameworks that have begun emerging from the working group. I will discuss some of the key considerations for the assessment of ecosystem services bundles and the importance of social relationships in the analysis of ecosystem services bundles, and also present some preliminary analyses of ecosystem services and trade-offs across landscape gradients and discuss and a framework to synthesize ecosystem service interactions in a range of landscapes.

Ecosystem services research and management need to incorporate complex social-ecological interconnections across scales to address sustainability challenges. Such cross-scale interactions can be analysed through a telecoupling framework as it connects human and natural coupled systems through flows over long distances. Here, the telecoupling framework allows us to uncover the winners and losers regarding access to ecosystem services, the power differences regarding ecosystem services management among social actors and the scale at which power is concentrated. Our results suggest that the spatial mismatch between the dependence on ecosystem services (local level) and decision making (supra-local level) can foster both environmental degradation and inequity to distant communities. We conclude that providing a more equal access to ecosystem services and sharing the power in decision making at local scale across social actors can counteract the negative impact on sustainability of such mismatch.

Land-use intensification can increase provisioning ecosystem services, such as food and timber production, but it also drives changes in ecosystem functioning and biodiversity loss, which may ultimately compromise human wellbeing. To understand how changes in land-use intensity affect the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and services, we built networks from correlations between the species richness of 16 trophic groups, 10 ecosystem functions, and 15 ecosystem services. We evaluated how the properties of these networks varied across land-use intensity gradients for 150 forests and 150 grasslands. Land-use intensity significantly affected network structure in both habitats. Changes in connectance were larger in forests, while changes in modularity and evenness were more evident in grasslands. Our results show that increasing land-use intensity leads to more homogeneous networks with less integration within modules in both habitats, driven by the belowground compartment in grasslands, while forest responses to land management were more complex. Land-use intensity strongly altered hub identity and module composition in both habitats, showing that the positive correlations of provisioning services with biodiversity and ecosystem functions found at low land-use intensity levels, decline at higher intensity levels. Our approach provides a comprehensive view of the relationships between multiple components of biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services and how they respond to land use. This can be used to identify overall changes in the ecosystem, to derive mechanistic hypotheses, and it can be readily applied to further global change drivers.

National and local governments need to step up efforts to effectively implement the post-2020 global biodiversity framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity to halt and reverse worsening biodiversity trends. Drawing on recent advances in interdisciplinary biodiversity science, we propose a framework for improved implementation by national and subnational governments. First, the identification of actions and the promotion of ownership across stakeholders need to recognize the multiple values of biodiversity and account for remote responsibility. Second, cross-sectorial implementation and mainstreaming should adopt scalable and multifunctional ecosystem restoration approaches and target positive futures for nature and people. Third, assessment of progress and adaptive management can be informed by novel biodiversity monitoring and modeling approaches handling the multidimensionality of biodiversity change.

Background Forests perform various important ecosystem functions that contribute to ecosystem services. In many parts of the world, forest management has shifted from a focus on timber production to multi-purpose forestry, combining timber production with the supply of other forest ecosystem services. However, it is unclear which forest types provide which ecosystem services and to what extent forests primarily managed for timber already supply multiple ecosystem services. Based on a comprehensive dataset collected across 150 forest plots in three regions differing in management intensity and species composition, we develop models to predict the potential supply of 13 ecosystem services. We use those models to assess the level of multifunctionality of managed forests at the national level using national forest inventory data. Results Looking at the potential supply of ecosystem services, we found trade-offs (e.g. between both bark beetle control or dung decomposition and both productivity or soil carbon stocks) as well as synergies (e.g. for temperature regulation, carbon storage and culturally interesting plants) across the 53 most dominant forest types in Germany. No single forest type provided all ecosystem services equally. Some ecosystem services showed comparable levels across forest types (e.g. decomposition or richness of saprotrophs), while others varied strongly, depending on forest structural attributes (e.g. phosphorous availability or cover of edible plants) or tree species composition (e.g. potential nitrification activity). Variability in potential supply of ecosystem services was only to a lesser extent driven by environmental conditions. However, the geographic variation in ecosystem function supply across Germany was closely linked with the distribution of main tree species. Conclusions Our results show that forest multifunctionality is limited to subsets of ecosystem services. The importance of tree species composition highlights that a lack of multifunctionality at the stand level can be compensated by managing forests at the landscape level, when stands of complementary forest types are combined. These results imply that multi-purpose forestry should be based on a variety of forest types requiring coordinated planning across larger spatial scales.