Mapping linkages between biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people: a ValPar.CH perspective

The approach of Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) has been developed to emphasize human dependence on nature and to better target environmental conservation efforts. While the methods used for NCP assessments have evolved greatly over the last 20 years, the challenge of how to best link and predict NCP to and from individual species or biotic communities still remains largely unmet. Current NCP-based conservation prioritization methods tend to fail to account for individual species and many other dimensions of biodiversity (BD). Therefore, land-management policies based on simple NCP mapping are unlikely to properly account for the full complexity of ecosystems and can ultimately lead to biodiversity loss. Furthermore, as landscapes are increasingly modified by anthropogenic forces, the remaining (semi-)natural ecosystems represent a potential ecological ‘infrastructure’ to be maintained and kept functional. In this working paper, we provide i) a review on the BD-NCP spatial relationships, ii) the main methods used for their study, iii) the main research gaps, and iv) recommendations on how the study of their relationships can be improved, especially when considering a national ecological infrastructure (EI), and a roadmap about how we will approach this subject within the ValPar.CH project. The roadmap focuses on the EI mapping objectives of ValPar.CH, and its main stakeholders.