soil structure |
The arrangement of soil particles in a variety of recognized shapes and sizes.
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Land degradation and restoration assessment |
solitary bee |
Bees that are not fully social (such as honey bees (q.v.), bumble bees (q.v.) and stingless bees (q.v.)), but are instead solitary or primitively social. There are more than 19,000 species of solitary bee.
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Pollination assessment |
sovereignty principle |
Sovereignty in the sense of contemporary public international law denotes the basic international legal status of a state that is not subject, within its territorial jurisdiction, to the governmental, executive, legislative, or judicial jurisdiction of a foreign state or to foreign law other than public international law. A sovereign entity can decide and administer its own laws, can determine the use of its land and can do pretty much as it pleases, free of external influence (within the limitations of international law).
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Land degradation and restoration assessment |
spatial downscaling |
see downscaling.
|
Scenarios and models assessment |
spatial scale |
Comprised of two properties: 1) spatial extent - the size of the total area of interest for a particular study (e.g. a watershed, a country, the entire planet); and 2) spatial grain (or resolution) - the size of the spatial units within this total area for which data are observed or predicted (e.g. fine-grained or coarse-grained grid cells).
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Scenarios and models assessment, Pollination assessment |
spatial scale |
In ecology, spatial scale refers to the spatial extent of ecological processes. The responses of organisms, populations, species or communities to the environment may differ at larger or smaller scales. Choosing the scale appropriate to a given ecological process is crucial to hypothesizing and determining the underlying causes of the processes and effects involved.
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specialist species |
A species that can thrive only in restrictive environmental conditions and can make use of only a few different (even only one) resources (for example, a flower-visiting insect that lives on the floral resources provided by one plant or a few different plants or a plant that depends on just one or only a few animal species for pollination).
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Pollination assessment |
species |
An interbreeding group of organisms that is reproductively isolated from all other organisms, although there are many partial exceptions to this rule in particular taxa. Operationally, the term species is a generally agreed fundamental taxonomic unit, based on morphological or genetic similarity, that once described and accepted is associated with a unique scientific name.
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Land degradation and restoration assessment, Asia-Pacific assessment, Sustainable use assessment, Americas assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment |
species composition |
The array of species in a specific sample, community, or area.
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Sustainable use assessment, Americas assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment |
species composition |
The array of species in a specific region, area, or assembly.
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Land degradation and restoration assessment, Global assessment (1st work programme), Asia-Pacific assessment |
species distribution model |
Species distribution models relate field observations of the presence/absence of a species to environmental predictor variables, based on statistically or theoretically derived response surfaces, for prediction and inference. The predictor variables are often climatic but can include other environmental variables.
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Sustainable use assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment, Americas assessment |
species extirpation |
The local extinction of a species.
|
Global assessment (1st work programme) |
species richness |
The number of species within a given sample, community, or area.
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Global assessment (1st work programme), Americas assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment, Asia-Pacific assessment, Land degradation and restoration assessment, Sustainable use assessment |
species richness |
Number of species.
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Pollination assessment |
species trait |
The morphological, physiological, phonological or behavioural characteristics of an organism, that typically inform about its response to the environment and effects on the ecosystem (Lavorel & Garnier, 2002; Violle et al., 2007).
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Global assessment (1st work programme) |
species trait |
The morphological, physiological, phonological or behavioral characteristics of an organism, that typically inform about its response to the environment and effects on the ecosystem.
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Sustainable use assessment |
species-area relationship |
A well-known strong empirical relationship between the area (A) of a region or patch of habitat and the number of species (S) it contains. Over most spatial scales, a power-law relationship S = cAz provides a good fit to data, with z often around 0.25 for separate sets of regions (known as the island species-area relationship) and 0.15 for nested parts of the same region (known as the continental species-area relationship). The species- area relationship has often been used to estimate the size of an extinction debt (qv) resulting from habitat loss.
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Global assessment (1st work programme) |
species-led management |
invasive alien species management (in all contexts) focused on reducing the threats and impacts of specific or multiple invasive alien species.
|
Invasive alien species assessment |
specific values |
Specific values of nature are opinions or judgments regarding the importance of nature in a particular situation or context. Specific values can be grouped into three types: instrumental, intrinsic and relational values.
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Values assessment |
spillover (a. reference to populations; b. reference to disease transmission) |
Pathogen spillover refers to the transfer of one or more pathogens from one population or species (or biotype) to another. A spillover event occurs when an infected reservoir population causes an epidemic in a novel host population.
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Pollination assessment |
spillover effect |
Human impacts or natural disturbances beyond system boundaries. These effects can be positive or negative, socioeconomic or/and environmental and can be much more profound than the effects within the focal system.
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Sustainable use assessment |
spillover effects |
Human impacts or natural disturbances beyond system boundaries. These effects can be positive or negative, socioeconomic or/and environmental and can be much more profound than the effects within the focal system (Liu et al., 2013).
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Global assessment (1st work programme) |
stability (socio-ecological system) |
The degree to which a system can continue to function if inputs, controls, or conditions are disrupted. It is a reflection of how minor a perturbation is capable of rendering the system inoperable or degraded; the types of perturbation to which the system is especially vulnerable; whether the system can “ignore” certain stresses; and the degree to which the system can be altered by surprise.
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Sustainable use assessment, Global assessment (1st work programme) |
stages of invasion |
Refers to the three stages that a species must successfully transit by in an invasion process and become an invasive species.
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Americas assessment |
stakeholder |
Actors that are involved in decision making processes and implementation, either as influencing the decision-making process, or as being dependent on, and therefore facing the consequences of, the decisions (incl. Public, private and civil society actors). For the values assessment, 13 stakeholder groups have been identified that can be categorised in three categories: Influencers, affected actors and key players (See section 6.1.2.2).
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Values assessment |
stakeholder |
Any individuals, groups or organizations who affect, or could be affected (whether positively or negatively) by a particular issue and its associated policies, decisions and action.
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Land degradation and restoration assessment, Sustainable use assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment, Asia-Pacific assessment, Americas assessment, Scenarios and models assessment, Africa assessment |
state (socio-ecological system) |
The collection of variables that describe the whole of the social- ecological system, including the attributes of ecosystem service providers and beneficiaries.
|
Sustainable use assessment |
state (socio-ecological system) |
The collection of variables that describe the whole of the social-ecological system, including the attributes of ecosystem service providers and beneficiaries (Harrington et al., 2010).
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Global assessment (1st work programme) |
statistical downscaling |
Downscaling based on interpolation of statistical relationships between specific model or scenario metrics and predictors with higher resolution data.
|
Scenarios and models assessment |
statistical model |
see correlative model.
|
Scenarios and models assessment |
status |
Based in actual observations (data).
|
Sustainable use assessment |
stewardship |
The activity or job of protecting and being responsible for something.
|
Pollination assessment |
stewardship practice |
The responsible use and protection of the natural environment through conservation actions, active restoration and the sustainable use and management of resources (N. J. Bennett et al., 2018).
|
Global assessment (1st work programme) |
stewardship practice |
The responsible use and protection of the natural environment through conservation actions, active restoration and the sustainable use and management of resources.
|
Sustainable use assessment |
stingless bee |
A large group of social bees (about 500 species), comprising the tribe Meliponini, characterized by a highly reduced stinger that cannot be used for defense. Stingless belong in the family Apidae, and are related to common honey bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees, and bumble bees.
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Pollination assessment |
stochastic uncertainty |
Random behaviour or unpredictability of complex natural, social and economic systems, particularly in relation to future states.
|
Scenarios and models assessment |
storyline |
Qualitative narratives which provide the descriptive framework from which quantitative exploratory scenarios can be formulated.
|
Scenarios and models assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment, Asia-Pacific assessment |
strategic environmental assessment |
A mechanism that attempts to assess systematically the environmental impacts of decisions made at, what is conventionally called, levels of strategic decisions.
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Land degradation and restoration assessment |
stratification (water column) |
The formation of layers of water masses with different properties - salinity, oxygenation, density, temperature - that act as barriers to water mixing. These layers are normally arranged according to density, with the least dense water masses sitting above the more dense layers.
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Global assessment (1st work programme) |
stressor |
see direct drivers.
|
Scenarios and models assessment |
subregion |
See Asia-Pacific region.
|
Asia-Pacific assessment |
subsistence |
Subsistence is defined as the livelihood uses in which a species is used or consumed directly by the individual who obtained it from the wild and his/her/their direct social network.
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Sustainable use assessment |
subsistence agriculture |
Farming system emphasizing production for use rather than for sale (FAO, 1998).
|
Global assessment (1st work programme) |
succession (ecological) |
The process whereby communities of plants, animals and microorganisms are replaced by others, usually more complex, over time as an area is colonized. Primary succession occurs on bare ground (e.g. after a volcanic eruption); secondary succession follows the interruption of a primary succession, e.g. after disturbances such as logging, ploughing or burning.
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Global assessment (1st work programme) |
succession (ecological) |
The process whereby communities of plants, animals and microorganisms are replaced by others, usually more complex, over time as an area is colonized. Primary succession occurs on bare ground (after a volcanic eruption); secondary succession follows the interruption of a primary succession, e.g. after disturbances such as logging, ploughing or burning.
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Sustainable use assessment |
summary for policymakers |
A component of any report, providing a policy-relevant but not policy prescriptive summary of that report.
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Land degradation and restoration assessment, Americas assessment, Asia-Pacific assessment, Sustainable use assessment, Africa assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment |
summary for policymakers |
Is a component of any report, providing a policy-relevant but not policy prescriptive summary of that report.
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|
supporting material |
Consists of four categories: Intercultural and inter-scientific dialogue reports that are based on the material generated at the eco-regional level by discussions between members of academic, indigenous and social organizations and that take into account the different approaches, visions and knowledge systems that exist as well as the various views and approaches to sustainable development; Workshop proceedings and materials that are either commissioned or supported by the Platform; Software or databases that facilitate the use of the Platform's reports; Guidance materials (guidance notes and guidance documents) that assist in the preparation of comprehensive and scientifically sound Platform reports and technical papers.
|
Africa assessment |
supporting material |
Consists of four categories:(a) Intercultural and interscientific dialogue reports that are based on the material generated at the ecoregional level by discussions between members of academic, indigenous and social organizations and that take into account the diff erent approaches, visions and knowledge systems that exist as well as the various views and approaches to sustainable development;(b) Workshop proceedings and materials that are either commissioned or supported by the Platform;(c) Software or databases that facilitate the use of the Platform's reports;(d) Guidance materials (guidance notes and guidance documents) that assist in the preparation of comprehensive and scientifically sound Platform reports and technical papers.
|
Global assessment (1st work programme) |
surface mining |
Includes strip mining, open-pit mining and mountaintop removal mining, is a broad category of mining in which soil and rock overlying the mineral deposit (the overburden) are removed.
|
Land degradation and restoration assessment |