Assessing Ecosystem Services at Different Scales in the Portugal Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

is analyzing the condition of ecosystem services in Portugal, recent trends in those services, available policy responses, and scenarios for the next fifty years, following the conceptual framework of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2003). It is a multiscale assessment, carried out at the national, basin, and local scales. The assessment started in 2003, published a status report after two years (Pereira, Domingos, and Vicente 2004), and will publish the final results in 2006. Of the thirty MA subglobal assessments, ptMA and the Southern African Millennium Ecosystem Assessment are the only two comprehensive multiscale assessments. As illustrated elsewhere in this volume, multiscale assessments allow the evaluation of the robustness and persistence of findings across scales and provide information benefits: more and better data, ground-truthing of data, and better analysis of the causes of change (Zermoglio et al. 2005). Here we present the findings that resulted from conducting ptMA as a multiscale assessment and from ptMA itself being nested in the global MA. We start by describing how the different scales were analyzed in ptMA and how the MA framework was adapted. Next, we discuss how epistemologies were bridged within the assessment, including what barriers existed in the communication among experts in different fields, how the users interacted with the scientists, and how the scientists interacted with the local population in Chapter 4