Section: Application Domains

Eco-system services

Long-term sustainability is closely related to the underlying ecosystems, on various fronts: production of renewable resources (either energy or biomass), waste and pollutant resorption, local and global climate regulations etc. These various functions constitute the “ecosystem services” provided to society by our natural environment.

The reduction of the adverse impacts of urban areas on the environment is linked not only to limiting urban sprawl and making more efficient use of the available resources, but also to developing a better grasp of the interrelations between urban/peri-urban areas and their agricultural and semi-natural surroundings. In particular, reducing distant impacts while making a better use of local resources is a major challenge for the coming decades.

In this context, the STEEP team is involved in the ESNET project, bearing on the characterization of local Ecosystem Services Networks, piloted by LECA (Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine), and in collaboration with a number of other research laboratories (most notably, IRSTEA Grenoble) and a panel of local stakeholders; the scale of interest is typically a landscape (in the ecologic/geographic sense, i.e., a zone a few kilometers to a few tens of kilometers wide). The project aims at developing a generic modelling framework of ecosystem services, and studying their behavior under various scenarios of coupled urban/environment evolution. The contribution of the STEEP team is centered on the Land Use/Land Cover Change (LUCC) model that will be one of the major building blocks of the whole model.