Project overview

ILIAS is funded through a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship project and is located at the Centre for Functional Ecology – Science for People & the Planet (CFE) at the University of Coimbra.
The principal investigator for the project is Dr. Christine Horn.
The project supervisor is Prof. Fátima Alves at the Universidade Aberta / University of Coimbra.

The project is part of the research group Societies and Environmental Sustainability / Sociedades e Sustentabilidade Ambiental led by Prof. Fátima.

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Project summary

The dispersal of invasive plant and animal species (IAS) causes significant environmental and economic damage in countries across the world. Facilitated by globalization and climate change, IAS threaten native species and harm agricultural livelihoods. Despite growing awareness of this issue, the prevention, management and removal of IAS is difficult as well as costly, controversial and often unsuccessful.

One key problem is that much of the scientific, public and political debate is influenced by conceptual differences about the way terms such as ‘nature’ or ‘biodiversity’ are defined, about what it means to be native or alien to an area, about intrinsic rights of nature and about the role of human intervention in the management of the environment. While recent EU legislation emphasizes the importance of environmental conservation and the protection of biodiversity, these differences between individuals and groups, which reflect wider social, cultural, religious and historical influences, shape scientific and political responses, lead to ethical and moral conflict and stand in the way of collaborative efforts to IAS management.

This project investigates how socio-cultural beliefs and attitudes shape programs to manage IAS in protected areas within different EU member countries, their influence on the interpretation of current scientific evidence and best-practice for IAS management, and how this affects the implementation of EU laws.

The project is an interdisciplinary project that combines methods and theories from the humanities, social and environmental sciences and contributes data relevant to all three disciplines.

The project compiles data from case studies in Natura 2000 protected areas in different EU countries including conservation hotspots such as island ecosystems but also areas where commercial land use is ongoing and must be consolidated with environmental conservation and restoration. Data is collected from three groups of stakeholders: Landowners, land managers and users; ecologists and conservationists in the government sector, within non-government organizations (NGOs) and academia; and local, federal and administrators and policymakers.

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Project documents

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