Despite warnings of strong winds and snow forecast for the North of Scotland, Jan Dick and Cecilia Zagaria set off from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology on a late December afternoon. Equipped with designed maps and questionnaires, they boarded the much needed pick-up truck with the purpose to run a pilot survey for the spatial investigation of community values for cultural ecosystem services in Glenlivet Estate, deep within the snowy ridges of the Cairngorms National Park. Read more »
Photo: Cecilia Zagaria at Tomintoul, Glenlivet Estate, Cairngorms National Park
There was a lot of networking and exchanging going on at the Belgian Ecosystem Services Community (BEES) Christmas market. For the first time in its three years existence BEES organized this national event to share knowledge and practices on ecosystem services. The OpenNESS project contributed a European flavour to the event with a stand, which was combined by project partners ECNC and INBO, who presented the two Belgian case studies. 
OpenNESS organised a training workshop on 19-21 November 2014 in Edinburgh on how to quantify, map and 
The OpenNESS work package on 
During a meeting of the user board of the OPERAs project (the European research project with which OpenNESS cooperates on operationalising 
The Oppla team (participants from OpenNESS and OPERAs developing a common platform) met on 20-21 October in Brussels to take stock of progress and agree next steps. Good progress was made since the previous meeting in Edinburgh last July, where the team focused on the business plan for developing Oppla. This is an important component in the process, as the platform will need to continue beyond the project life span as an independent entity. 
At 8 October the IRSTEA team (
On a wet blustery day fifteen local stakeholders met with a seven-person OpenNESS team in Tomintoul, the highest village in the Scottish Highlands. They met to discuss their general knowledge needs in relation to the Tomintoul and Glenlivet 
On the 4th October 2014, the regional radio station of Extremadura interviewed Berta Martín-López from the UAM partner of OpenNESS about the 
The Centre for Environmental Management (CEM) at the University of Nottingham recently employed a new research fellow in ecosystems and health for OpenNESS, named Conor Kretsch. He will mainly work for Work Package 1 – particularly looking at how conceptual frameworks can be utilised to develop understanding of links between