Ecosystem services are not only valuable economically but also essential for human well-being and survival and this is increasingly being used as an argument for conserving biodiversity and habitats throughout the world. One of the outputs of the project titled Measuring and monitoring ecosystem services at the site scale: building practical tools for real-world conservation  funded and supported through CCI’s Collaborative Fund for Conservation is the production of a practical and non technical tool kit to measure and monitor ecosystem services at the site-scale.

“Assessing ecosystem services can support advocacy for the conservation of individual sites or for their restoration and monitoring levels of ecosystem services over time will also help guide better management and further support arguments for conservation”, says Kevin Peh, currently an AXA Post-doctoral fellow and the lead person testing and developing the toolkit.

The complete toolkit in the form of a manual will be published and circulated in early 2012 and will help identify and collect simple data on important ecosystem services at the focal test sites and could also be applicable across a large sample of sites worldwide. A recently produced booklet developed by Birdlife International and CCI gives a useful and illustrative introduction to ecosystem services in general and what the toolkit will cover and help achieve.    

The Universities of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin and three independent conservation organisations the RSPB, Birdlife International and UNEP-WCMC are currently working collaboratively on this project and the toolkit resulting from it.

The booklet describing the toolkit can be viewed and downloaded here.