The making of green infrastructure as a policy tool for biodiversity conservation

Green infrastructure (GI) has been launched as a concept and policy tool to improve biodiversity conservation and support of multiple ecosystem services, by including it into large-scale land-use planning under a changing climate and land-use changes. Therefore, how different actors understand GI may have profound consequences on biodiversity conservation across Europe within the next decades. To understand challenges and opportunities that this development imposes on biodiversity conservation, we urgently need research on the links between the underlying scientific evidence base for effective conservation strategies and the conceptualization and implementation of GI across multiple governance levels.
This project will:
1)review the ecological literature to establish to which extent organisms occurring in the fragmented landscapes are limited by dispersal
2) track the conceptual evolution of GI within peer-reviewed literature and in policy documents to better understand the interconnectedness or lack of such between science and policy in the area of GI.
3) map systematically how GI is understood by policy actors at different scales to establish the degree to which evidence has informed decisions.
This interdisciplinary postdoc project will establish close collaboration between ecologists, environmental scientists and political scientists within the BECC community and provide a platform for planning future joint research.

This project is funded by the SRA BECC.