SYSTANAL: a checklist for analysing ecosystems for the conservation of biological diversity

Conservation of biological diversity ideally means conservation of entire ecosystems. To conserve ecosystems on a sustainable basis, you need to understand how they work. SYSTANAL is a checklist for analysing ecosystems, developed during years of fieldwork and lecturing on tropical land use, to help ensure that all the most important aspects of ecosystems are considered. This includes of course the role of people in ecosystems (and agro-ecosystems), and the various benefits an ecosystem may provide to people. SYSTANAL touches upon: (1) participative integrated natural resource management; (2) the need to know where you start from and where you want to go; (3) the need to first take the broad view to define problems in ecosystems, then a narrow view to find potential solutions, and then again the broad view to see whether these solutions fit into the ecosystem as a whole (hourglass approach); (4) delimitation of system boundaries; (5) already existing knowledge; (6) the need to analyse historical, and likely future, developments; (7) the involvement of stakeholders, and what they know and are able and willing to do; (8) production being dependent on (the interaction between) both genetic and environmental factors; (9) socio-economic benefits; (10) a systematic classification of all the environmental factors that can affect how plants or animals use the production factors; (11) the production factors essential for plant functioning, and animal functioning, whether these plants and animals are wild or domesticated; (12) the pros and cons of spatial and temporal variability in production factors and environmental factors; (13) off-site effects; (14) the need to be quantitative whenever possible; and (15) the five key aspects of sustainability.