#2 Mapping ecosystem services for conservation planning in Canada with Matt Mitchell & Aerin Jacob

On this episode of the podcast we welcome Dr. Matt Mitchell and Dr. Aerin Jacob. Matt is a landscape ecologist working as a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD from McGill University in 2014 and has published extensively on a range of topics, including the ecological effects of landscape fragmentation, and the supporting role that biodiversity plays in agricultural productivity. Aerin is a conservation scientist working at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Aerin also received her PhD from McGill in 2014, and has published many research papers on the science-policy interface as it relates to environmental management, and the role of spatial planning for protected area creation and management. Matt and Aerin recently published a scientific article about measuring, mapping and protecting ecosystem services in Canada. We talked a lot about their research paper, digging into the methods that they used and the implications of their results, but also about the different values that we place on nature, access to nature and the benefits that ecosystems provide, the state of the science for ecosystem services, and the competing demands of conservation and economic development. Link to the open access article: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abc121/meta Matt's website: https://mgemitchell.weebly.com/ Aerin's website:  http://www.aerinjacob.ca/ More about the podcast: https://www.emergingenvironments.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmergingEnviro1