NatureScot is committed to reversing the decline in freshwater biodiversity by protecting and improving ecosystem health in protected areas. This effort aligns with Scotland’s goal to safeguard 30% of its land and sea by 2030. This project makes recommendations on a monitoring framework that would inform management decisions to deliver healthy ecosystems. To achieve this, monitoring efforts must shift toward a broader landscape or catchment-scale approach, providing a more comprehensive understanding of freshwater and wetland ecosystems.

The project recommends developing a multi-index ecosystem assessment framework that will:

• Use indicators of pressures, physicochemical state and biological impact to assess ecosystem health.
• Help decision-makers allocate monitoring resources appropriately to inform the delivery of healthy ecosystems.
• Facilitate data sharing and inter-organisational collaboration to create practical conservation strategies.

The project found that to support this transition, NatureScot can leverage existing tools while exploring new, innovative approaches. The key steps in this transition include:

1. Working with monitoring partners to assess the availability, format, and accessibility of existing healthy ecosystem indicator data.
2. Building the necessary skills to collate, interpret and apply a wider ecosystems dataset.
3. Developing a data integration approach that will synthesis ecosystem data across a range of data types and scales.
4. Evaluating the policy, resource, and legislative implications of a new monitoring approach.

This project has completed. Click here to visit the publication page to view the project outputs.