Land conservation and restoration
The landscape is under increasing anthropogenic pressure, which significantly affects its functioning. The Global Risks Report 2019, presented at the Davos Economic Forum, identifies the main threats facing our society. Eight threats are classified as serious and likely, six of these are closely related to the loss of landscape's ability to provide ecosystem services. The proposed programme seeks to understand the environmental correlations of anthropogenic human activity on the landscape, it seeks to find ways to use the landscape that will be sustainable in the long run and at the same time develop procedures to restore the damaged landscape.
The whole landscape and its individual components - soil, water, atmosphere, biodiversity, ecosystems - are under increasing anthropogenic pressure, which significantly affects their functioning. At the same time, in addition to agricultural and forestry production, the landscape provides us with a whole range of other ecosystem services on which the well-being of our society depends. Constanza et al (1997) calculated that the economic value of ecosystem services significantly exceeds the GDP of all countries in the world. The Global Risks Report 2019, presented at the Davos Economic Forum, identifies the main threats facing our society. Eight threats are classified as serious and likely, six of these are closely related to the loss of landscape's ability to provide ecosystem services. This decline in ecosystem services provided by individual ecosystems and the landscape as a whole is even more pronounced with the advancing climate change. Unfortunately, rather than the protection and restoration of landscape functions, which would bring economic, long-term and complex solutions, we are constantly reaching for technical end of pipe solutions, which bring partial solutions to partial problems, but usually create others. One of the reasons for this situation is the insufficient understanding of natural processes that enable proper use of the landscape and protect the valuable natural processes, which form the basis of ecosystem services, and possibly restore damaged and degraded ecosystems.
The goal of the research programme is to identify possible future threats to the functioning of our landscape, which could be reflected in the deterioration of the quality of ecosystem services provided. Subsequently, we deal with the development of sustainable ways of using the landscape and finally the development of methods that can be used to restore the damaged landscape. This set of topics brings a comprehensive set of solutions to the most pressing problems of our current landscape and can contribute to the long-term provision of ecosystem services necessary for the functioning of human society.
The coordinator of the programme is prof. Mgr. Ing. Jan Frouz, CSc., Biology Centre of the CAS.
The main goals are to answer the following questions:
What is happening to our landscape?
How to use our landscape properly?
How to restore a damaged landscape?
