Project: Resilience of marginal grasslands and biodiversity management decision support

European marginal grasslands are biodiversity hot spots owing to ecological constraints, biophysical heterogeneity, and centuries of agriculture. Currently it is not clear whether they are vulnerable to ongoing environmental, socio-economic and political changes, or if they have developed a high resilience over their history of co-evolution between humans and ecosystems. If so, the limits to this resilience are unknown, and their prediction hazardous. This uncertainty lies largely in the poor knowledge of resilience mechanisms of the ecological and human sub-systems, and of the role of land management decisions and ecosystem services to foster robustness or vulnerability. REGARDS aims to unravel the mechanisms underpinning resilience of marginal grassland systems to environmental and social changes in order to enhance socio-ecological resilience from farm to regional level.

Acronym REGARDS
Duration 01/12/2012 - 30/11/2015
Website visit project website
Network BiodivERsA2
Call BiodivERsA Call 2011-2012 on Biodiversity dynamics

Project partner

Number Name Role Country
Catholic University of Louvain Belgium
Max Planck Society - Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Germany
National Centre for Scientific Research Coordinator France
Norwegian University of Science and Technology Norway
University of Innsbruck Austria