Glossary

Did you find some difficult-to-understand jargon in this story map?

It’s likely that you did, and for that reason we made this glossary of some fancy scientific terms, to help you navigate this story map.

We’re not diving too deep on definitions, just giving you the basics to keep things clear! Words can have different meanings in different contexts, and we, scientists, are picky about it. So, we’re sticking to the meanings that matter for our story map.

Let us know if this glossary has been of any help, or if there are any other terms you would like to see defined here.

Decision-making
The process of making decisions, especially important ones. The concept is mostly used in the context of organization, institutions, at the governmental level, etc.
Ecosystem Services (ES)
Ecosystem services are broadly defined as the benefits or contributions that people obtain from nature 1. For instance, the erosion control provided by riparian plants, the pollination of crops by insects, the provision of food from agriculture, the climate regulation provided by forest and wetlands, the happiness we feel when we look at a beautiful landscape, or the sense of place that communities experience on their lands.
Ecosystem services supply, demand and flow
For people to benefit from ES, at least three elements have to come together 2. The supply of the services has to do with the existence and functioning of ecosystems, their condition and the processes that allow the provision of the ES. For example, the control of heat islands in cities will depend on the abundance and distribution of urban greenspaces. The demand of an ES has to do with the people that need or want, directly or indirectly, an ES. Thinking of the heat island example, people in denser cities will produce a higher demand for temperature regulation than in less dense areas. The flow of an ES relates to all the interactions and processes that connect supply and demand. For instance, we don’t eat food straight from the crop fields. There are many people and many other variables interacting through space and time for food to travel from the field (supply) to the people buying or eating it (demand).
Ecosystem services trade-offs
Trade-offs occur when the provision of one ES is reduced as a consequence of the provision or use of another ES 3 4. For example, carbon storage provided by forests, that helps regulate global climate, will be diminished by timber production. On the other side, timber is a material that comes from Nature, and we humans use it for construction, heating, etc. So timber production is an ES that has a trade-off with climate regulation. Much of the research we do in ResNet around ESs has to do with how to better manage and reduce trade-offs!
Extent
It can be simply defined as the area occupied by the process or the object we are studying (the spatial extent), or its duration in time (temporal extent). The spatial extent is the size and boundaries of the study area, while the temporal extent is the specific period of time considered 5 6.
Grain
Grain refers to the “smallest or finest unit of data in a given data set” 5. In spatial analysis, “grain” is a synonym to “resolution” 6.
Some other related definitions of “grain” can be found in the literature 7, but those are not the definitions that we used in this story map.
Human Footprint
The Human Footprint refers to the sum of all human influences on Nature. It can be measured in multiple ways, but one way of thinking of it is as the amount of land or sea that is needed to support the ways of living (including everything that is consumed) of an individual, a population, a product, an activity, or a service 8 9.
Indicator
A comprehensive definition of indicators was proposed by Heink and Kowarik (2010):
“​An indicator in ecology and environmental planning is a component or a measure of environmentally relevant phenomena used to depict or evaluate environmental conditions or changes or to set environmental goals.” 10
For instance, to evaluate air pollution, we measure the appearance and concentration of some chemicals in the air (as sulfurs). These chemicals are then indicators of the (bad) quality of the air. Another example: Coral bleaching is an indicator of a process of ocean acidification, which is in turn a consequence of climate change and its impact on the sea.
Landscape
We can think of a “landscape” as an area or a region of interest for some study purpose, that is usually heterogeneous (at least at some point). It is the piece of Earth with which humans interact, either we modify it, or we appreciate it 5. There is a similar term, “seascape”, used when we refer to the ocean.
Mismatch
Mismatch basically refers to the non-coincidence of things. Mismatch can be spatial (things don’t coincide in location), temporal (things don’t coincide in time) or even scalar (things don’t coincide in scale).

For instance: Bees need to travel from their nesting places to flowering crops if they are to pollinate the crops that will become food for people. Some crops will bloom in spring, some in summer, while different species of pollinators are active at different times of the year. For pollination to occur, the activity time of at least some pollinators needs to coincide with the flower blooming time. There are some nice examples of mismatches and how this affects pollination in the Spatial, temporal, & scale mismatches section.

Model
A model is an abstract representation, usually mathematical, of a system or a process. Models are intended to help describe and understand a part of the world that is not that easy to grasp by our senses 11 12.
When describing or analyzing an ecological process, it is almost impossible to account for all the variables and inter-dependencies among ecosystem components, given the limited basic information available for analyses and processing capacities of computers. For that reason, scientists use models, in which they select some important variables that need to be considered, and the phenomena of interest is studied considering only this limited set of variables.
Patch
A region, a portion of surface that differs from its surroundings 5.
For example, we can talk of a patch of forest immersed among agricultural fields. In a typical agricultural landscape, it’s usual to see multiple (rather small) patches of forest, separated from each other, and that can have different sizes and shapes, interspersed with crop fields and farms.
From a computer modelling perspective, a patch is a contiguous group of cells with the same class or category.
Resolution
Resolution refers to precision of a measurement, the finest level of measurement 6. In the context of spatial analysis, resolution refers to the level of detail at which geographic data is represented. The resolution determines the smallest object that can be identified as a separate entity on a map or image.
For instance, you might read something like “Landsat imagery had a resolution of 30 m x 30 m”. That means that we won’t be able to differentiate (in the image) any object that is smaller than 30 m x 30 m.
Scale
The scale refers to the dimensions of processes, phenomena or objects. Dimensions are spatial or temporal, that is, we can talk of a spatial scale, or a temporal scale 5 6.
See the figure in the Introduction section.

Glossary References

  1. Ecosystems and human well-being: synthesis. (Island Press, 2005). ↩︎

  2. Villarreal-Rosas, J. et al. Advancing Systematic Conservation Planning for Ecosystem Services. Trends Ecol. Evol. (2020). ↩︎

  3. Bennett, E. M., Peterson, G. D. & Gordon, L. J. Understanding relationships among multiple ecosystem services. Ecol. Lett. 12, 1394–1404 (2009). ↩︎

  4. Raudsepp-Hearne, C., Peterson, G. D. & Bennett, E. M. Ecosystem service bundles for analyzing tradeoffs in diverse landscapes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 107, 5242–5247 (2010). ↩︎

  5. Turner, M. G. & Gardner, R. H. Landscape Ecology in Theory and Practice. (Springer New York, 2015). doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-2794-4. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. Fletcher, R. & Fortin, M.-J. Spatial Ecology and Conservation Modeling: Applications with R. (Springer International Publishing, 2018). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-01989-1. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. Mayer, A. L. & Cameron, G. N. Consideration of grain and extent in landscape studies of terrestrial vertebrate ecology. Landsc. Urban Plan. 65, 201–217 (2003). ↩︎

  8. Odling-Smee, J. & Turner, J. S. Niche Construction Theory and Human Architecture. Biol. Theory 6, 283–289 (2011). ↩︎

  9. Venter, O. et al. Global terrestrial Human Footprint maps for 1993 and 2009. Sci. Data 3, 160067 (2016). ↩︎

  10. Heink, U. & Kowarik, I. What are indicators? On the definition of indicators in ecology and environmental planning. Ecol. Indic. 10, 584–593 (2010). ↩︎

  11. Graebner, C. How to Relate Models to Reality? An Epistemological Framework for the Validation and Verification of Computational Models. J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul. 21, 8 (2018). ↩︎

  12. Frigg, R. & Nguyen, J. Models and Representation. in Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science (eds. Magnani, L. & Bertolotti, T.) 49–102 (Springer International Publishing, 2017). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-30526-4_3. ↩︎

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