One of the objectives of the "Action for the Climate" LIFE programme of the EU is to improve the knowledge base for development, appraisal, monitoring, evaluation and implementation of actions and measures regarding adaptation to climate change. To fulfil this objective, the development of a monitoring plan that gauges the effectiveness of actions is an essential part of all the LIFE+ projects. This requisite means actions must have an experimental design that enables comparisons between treated and untreated areas, before and after intervention.

Monitoring to gauge the effectiveness of Life Adaptamed project actions is done at two levels: comprehensively, using remote sensing techniques that characterise how the whole ecosystem works, and in detail by characterising the flora, fauna and environments at specific sites in the study areas. The variables recorded include, among others, coverage and productivity of vegetation, estimated based on satellite imagery, and ground humidity and fertility. Also taken into account is the structure of the different vegetation substrates (specific composition, foliage index, growth, density, etc) and the presence of different fauna groups (passerine birds, micro-mammals, terrestrial arthropods, pollinators, etc).

One challenge of Life ADAPTAMED will be to combine the results obtained in the three very different spaces included in the project (Sierra Nevada, Doñana and Cabo de Gata). The partners UGR, CSIC and UAL, forming the project's Scientific Coordination Committee, are dealing with this challenge; the project director, technical coordinator and technical supervisors also participate.

Another special aspect of the Life ADAPTAMED monitoring plan is its timeline, meant to continue beyond the project's own duration. The ‘post-LIFE' phase is especially important because it focuses its actions on slow-growth forest systems subject to the major variations inherent to the Mediterranean climate, whereby changes take more time to become manifest and are harder to detect. The partners considered from the start that this project should lay the groundwork for a common long-term plan to monitor effects of climate change in those three natural spaces, which are part of the Network of Global Change Observatories in Andalusia.

For more information: Guyonne Janss

Photo: Sampling of invertebrates in the Doñana pine forest © CSIC - EBD