PhD thesis defense - 13 June at 9.00

PhD thesis defense: Kai Li, IGN, LAP, defends his thesis:

Ecosystem service restoration, conservation, and supply-demand spatial mismatch mitigation in landscape planning

Supervisors:
Professor Hans Skov-Petersen, IGN, KU
Associate Professor Peter Stubkjær Andersen, IGN, KU
Associate Professor Ying Hou, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, China

Asessment committee
Associate Professor Zhao Yuanyuan, Beijing Forestry University, China
Professor Benjamin Burkhard, Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany
Associate Professor Ole Fryd, IGN, KU (Chair)

Ecosystem degradation is not only related to the loss of the intrinsic value of ecosystems, but is also threatening human wellbeing from different aspects such as security and health. The ecosystem service (ES), which is defined as the benefit provided by ecosystems to people, has been proposed to mitigate ecosystem degradation and promote human wellbeing by managing ecosystems.

Summary:
Ecosystem degradation is not only related to the loss of the intrinsic value of ecosystems, but is also threatening human wellbeing from different aspects such as security and health. The ecosystem service (ES), which is defined as the benefit provided by ecosystems to people, has been proposed to mitigate ecosystem degradation and promote human wellbeing by managing ecosystems.

Today, landscape planning has become an important science-policy interface for the ES. This thesis explores the approach to incorporating ecosystem service knowledge into landscape planning. specifically, objectives of landscape planning are described using the ES concept, i.e., ES conservation, restoration, and supply-demand spatial mismatch mitigation in this study. Meanwhile, different ESs are quantified and mapped to provide spatially explicit information for ES-related decisions in landscape planning.

The main contributions of this thesis include: (1) developing a cost-benefit method for identifying ES restoration areas, which can improve the ES gains and reduce the socioeconomic cost; (2) exploring how to integrate the conservation cost, ecosystem health, and ES social importance into ES conservation area identification; and (3) providing a novel perspective to broaden decision makers’ thinking about how to mitigate ES supply-demand spatial mismatches.