Dear ESMERALDA friends and collaborators,
 

ESMERALDA MAES Explorer: The online tool that helps EU Member states map and assess ecosystems and their services
 

The ESMERALDA MAES Explorer aids decision-makers from policy, science and society to implement Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) at different levels. MAES can reach from national policy to local spatial planning or businesses, who want to support sustainable resource use and understand the condition of ecosystems, their ability to provide services and the socio-cultural and economic values related to them.
 
The online guidance tool is created by the collaborative EU Horizon 2020 funded Coordination and Support Action "ESMERALDA - Enhancing ecosystem services mapping for policy and decision making" to showcase major project results and to make them available Open Access, in support of Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. 

Click through the 7-step guidance tool, which introduces you to various questions arising from policy, business or society, through supporting stakeholder identification and related network creation. The ESMERALDA MAES Explorer provides ESMERALDA-derived practical guidance to mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services, all the way to dissemination of respective outcomes and their implementation in policy and decision making. 

To access the ESMERALDA MAES Explorer, click here.
 

An open science research collection on methods and applications
 

Methods, data, practical applications and research insights to guide scientists and practitioners through the process of mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services are the topic of the latest open science collection published in the open access journal One Ecosystem. 

The new Special Issue gives a 360-degree insight into the main results and shares experience from the three-and-a-half-year-long EU Horizon 2020-funded collaboration project ESMERALDA.

Spatial distribution of case study locations by country and type of ecosystem,
in which the mapping and assessment methods were applied. (Geneletti et al., 2018)

Focused on delivering a ‘flexible methodology’ to provide the building blocks for pan-European, national and regional ecosystem services mapping and assessment, ESMERALDA has generated a great deal of research insights and practical solutions on the topic. 

In its end-of-project Special Issue ESMERALDA shares results ranging from tested methods, collected datasets and case study experience, directly applicable to a range of practical situations, towards research papers that aim to support further scientific effort in the field. 

Key ESMERALDA Deliverables: We made it!

We are happy to announce that we have finalised all ESMERALDA Deliverable reports and submitted them to the European Commission just in time!
Among them were Deliverable reports

• D3.4 Guidance report on a multi-tiered flexible methodology for mapping ecosystems services integrating social, economic and biophysical value domains at different spatial and temporal scales
• D4.8 Report 2 on multifunctional assessment methods and the role of map analysis
• D5.4 Guidelines and recommendations to support the application of the final methods by policy and decision makers as well business and public sectors

All reports can be downloaded from the ESMERALDA website and from the ESMERALDA MAES Explorer.