ECOPOTENTIAL: Using Earth Observations to Protect Natural Landscapes

Terrestrial and marine ecosystems provide essential goods and services to human societies. In the last decades, however, anthropogenic pressure has produced a loss of ecosystem services that can seriously affect human wellbeing and climate processes at local and regional scale. In order to improve ecosystem benefits, knowledge-based conservation, management and restoration policies are urgently needed. Fundamental to all these is effective monitoring of the state and trends in ecosystem conditions and services. New monitoring methodologies are now available, combining approaches in geo- and bioscience, earth observation data, and in situ data. This digital poster synthesizes the objectives and methods of the ECOPOTENTIAL project, a European Horizon 2020 project started in June 2015, which has been designed to reach significant progress beyond the state of the art on ecosystem services. The project focuses its activities and pilot actions on a targeted set of internationally recognized protected areas (PA) in Europe, European Territories and beyond, over a broad range of habitats, ecosystems and landscapes, including wetlands, arid and mountain ecosystems.