Lancaster, Caroline

Project Title

Integration of Geodiversity into Ecosystem Services Frameworks

Abstract

Scotland has a range of geological features, landforms, processes and soil within its landscapes, all of which make up its unique geodiversity. Society benefits environmentally, socially, culturally and economically from the ecosystem services that this geodiversity provides. However, despite this known importance, geodiversity has historically been missed from the ecosystem approach to environmental management.

The aim of this research is to develop geodiversity indicator metrics across different environments, to enable geodiversity ecosystem services to be incorporated within policy and the management of landscapes in the future. This will be done by developing conceptual models to describe and quantify geodiversity within terrestrial, aquatic and marine environments, validating this in the field and testing the robustness of these indicators in the context of the geology that already exists.

Supervisors

Dr. Heidi Burdett, Professor John Ludden, Dr. Katie Whitbread, Dr. Helen Fallas and Mr. Angus Miller

Contact

Email: Ctl1@hw.ac.uk