At the beginning of March, 2017, a collection of participants from Work Package 7, and various other work packages connected to it, met in the Netherlands in order to discuss the current status of Ecosystem Service(ES) Assessment for the various Protected Areas(PAs) in the ECOPOTENTIAL project. During this meeting, the implementation of frameworks developed within the project was discussed and a synthesis of ecosystem functions and their relation to services and monitoring/modeling applications was undertaken. This served as a kick-off point for the further evaluation thereof across all sites who have participated in the Mind Mapping exercise, which seeks to connect functions to data sources and services within PAs. The distillation of this work will prove as input for the generation of Bayesian Belief Networks(BBNs). To this end, a participant from ETH in Switzerland attended and provided a hands-on workshop for the development of BBNs as well as assisting those present further develop their personal BBNs.
Amidst the hands-on workshops, several rounds of discussion emerged including methodologies for the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of cultural ESs, methods for expert elicitation, typologies of ecosystem functions, and much more. Additionally, progress was made on publications arising from this work package, and a concrete list of actions which will enable the ongoing work to be harmonized and continue to progress was agreed upon. While the time spent together was short during this one day workshop, the atmosphere was full of positivity and eagerness to move the work forwards and expand upon the achievements of the past year and a half.