Written by Henna Malinen
People and nature are interconnected in many ways. Our lives depend on nature’s goods and services, but our use of these resources has an impact on nature and its capacity to support us. In the BIONEXT project, we study the multiple interlinkages between biodiversity and human actions, or the so-called “biodiversity nexus”.
We in the BIONEXT project define the biodiversity nexus as something that “demonstrates the diverse, intertwined relationships between people and nature. It shows how our resource use affects nature and biodiversity and vice versa.” BIONEXT’s biodiversity nexus focuses on the interlinkages between biodiversity, climate change, water, food, energy, transport, and health. Each of these topics has been studied extensively from countless perspectives, but the evidence of the connections between them is scattered. Now we are trying to change that.
BIONEXT’s biodiversity nexus focuses on the interlinkages between biodiversity, climate change, water, food, energy, transport, and health.
A systematic approach to discover existing knowledge
To improve the knowledge base of these interlinkages we are pulling together scientific literature in a scoping review about the relationships between biodiversity, climate change, water, food, energy, transport, and health. We have defined sets of key terms and inclusion criteria to systematically search and select scientific papers that can shed light on our research questions regarding how biodiversity is affected and affects the other nexus elements.
From the pool of numerous qualitative and quantitative studies, experiments, long-term monitoring efforts, novel, and traditional approaches we aim to find twenty suitable papers on each three-way nexus meaning biodiversity and two other nexus elements. After we have identified the papers to be included in the review, each paper is read thoroughly by an expert in the team. Relevant information about each interlinkage is extracted from each paper in a uniform manner and the strength of evidence is rated. As a result, we will produce a synthesis of what we have learned.
Diverse expertise brought together
To tackle this multistage process and our broad nexus approach, we have a multidisciplinary group of scientists from seven BIONEXT partner institutions around Europe, bringing in their expertise from all the sectors considered in the review. To enable smooth and timely collaboration toward a synthesis ready to be published, the review team is led by Paula Harrison and her amazing team at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
Learning as we go
From my point of view, this work has been a continuous learning process. It is my first time participating in a literature review of this scale and I have been happy to learn that there’s a great balance of support and trust in everyone’s independent contributions in our team.
The nexus approach has also brought together some familiar topics but also pushed me to broaden my perspectives with new angles. My own expertise lies mainly in the urban context, and I am most familiar with the interlinkages between biodiversity and transport, but in this review I have also been working with food and water-related papers.
Henna is working through literature that focuses on transport and biodiversity coupled with food and water. Photo: Adobe Stock.
It has been truly interesting to learn how others have studied biodiversity interlinkages. We have also noticed that some combinations of nexus elements are less studied than others, at least based on the number of articles we have found so far. While our aim is to collect knowledge, the lack of it, in some cases, might be an equally interesting result if we can pinpoint the topics on which new research is needed.
Our next challenge, after we have found the literature and collected the data we need, is to make sense of it. The synthesis of our results will bring together existing evidence on the nexus interlinkages. We are working hard on our contribution to the knowledge base of biodiversity nexus and hope to be able to share the results later this year, so stay tuned!
Yours truly, researcher Henna Malinen.