Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
6th ESP Europe Conference "Advancing ecosystem services knowledge for achieving a nature and people positive Europe", Praha, Çek Cumhuriyeti, 18 - 22 Mayıs 2026, ss.1, (Özet Bildiri)
Over the past two decades, the concept of natural capital (NC) has become central to environmental andsustainability science, reflecting growing recognition of nature’s role in supporting human well-being.Natural capital assessments on islands remain significantly underrepresented. In addition, existing islandfocused studies concentrate on terrestrial aspects, often neglecting vital marine systems that supportisland ecosystems and communities. This study presents a proof-of-concept framework for integratednatural capital (NC) accounting on islands, explicitly incorporating both terrestrial and marine realms. Theanalysis focuses on natural capital stocks rather than ecosystem service flows and uses harmonised, panEuropean datasets to ensure comparability across islands and regions. Natural capital was represented bya parsimonious set of biophysical variables capturing habitat heterogeneity, biodiversity richness, andsecured (protected) natural assets. Only harmonised European datasets were used; national or localdatasets were deliberately excluded to minimise geographic bias. The analysed dataset comprises 70islands, spanning more than four orders of magnitude in terrestrial area and approximately three orders ofmagnitude in isolation, defined as distance to the nearest mainland or large landmass.A terrestrial and a marine natural capital index was calculated for every island in addition to twocomplementary metrics to explore the relative contribution of terrestrial and marine natural capital at theisland scale. Terrestrial natural capital increases systematically with island size. In contrast, marine naturalcapital shows a much weaker dependence on the size of the marine assessment area. While isolationinfluences the absolute magnitude of both terrestrial and marine natural capital, it does not systematically determine whether an island is dominated by land-based or sea-based natural capital. Marine naturalcapital is often as important as, and frequently more important than, terrestrial natural capital.