BC3 Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) is an Excellence Research Centre created in 2008, jointly promoted by the Basque Government and the Basque University in Spain. Its goal is to contribute knowledge on the causes and impacts of climate change, as well as drive advancements in high level research on these issues. Under the leadership of Professor Anil Markandya, BC3 seeks to contribute to solve this great challenge from the Basque Country, summing up efforts with other centres in the world, collaborating towards this ambitious goal. BC3 has four main research lines: Low Carbon, Climate and Natural Environment, Health and Climate, and Climate Policy. As of 2014 BC3 relies on a multidisciplinary team of 36 researchers and 4 management staff. BC3 has been ranked second place in the 2013 Climate Think Tank Ranking of ICCG (International Center for Climate Change Governance), ahead of 293 public and private organizations working in the field of climate change economics and policy. BC3 confirms its leadership position in Europe (BC3 was ranked number one in 2012 European Climate Think Tank Ranking) and moves up to second place in the World Top Class ranking.

The main role of BC3 in AQUACROSS is to support the ecosystem services assessment and valuation modelling. BC3’s main effort is concentrated in WP5, Causalities between Biodiversity, Ecosystem Functions and Services, and WP7, Forecasting Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Provision, providing the ARIES (Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services) modelling tool as a model integration platform and our expertise on the ecosystem service valuation.  BC3 also supports the assessment of causalities between ecosystem functions and services in the Case Study 1, Trade-offs in ecosystem-based fisheries management in the North Sea aimed at achieving Biodiversity Strategy targets, Case Study 2, Analysis of transboundary water ecosystems and green/blue infrastructures in the Intercontinental Biosphere Reserve of the Mediterranean Andalusia (Spain)-Morocco, and Case Study 5, Improving integrated management of Natura 2000 sites in the Vouga River, from catchment to coast. BC3 also contributes to the development of participatory scenarios and application of WP7 models in the case studies mentioned above.

Dr. Ferdinando Villa

Dr. Ferdinando Villa is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at BC3. He holds a PhD in theoretical Ecology and had a long parallel career as a scientific software designer and engineer. After working in many fields of Ecology, from theoretical island biogeography to spatially-explicit decision analysis, he discovered the joys and pains of interdisciplinary research during a long career in ecological economics at the universities of Maryland and Vermont. He has since expanded the focus of his research to the interface of policy, ecology and economics, concentrating on artificial intelligence approaches to assist environmental decision making and natural system assessment and valuation. Dr. Villa’s best known project is ARIES (Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services), which is producing a next-generation web application meant to make environmental decisions easier and more effective. The ARIES project builds on a partnership of international experts, NGOs, and academics, and pairs user and expert knowledge with advanced artificial intelligence to construct a model of a case study, making sure that no relevant data or knowledge is overlooked. Currently he is a principal investigator in BC3 of several projects like ASSETS or WISER (funded by NERC-ESPA) among others, and coordinates a group of researchers under “Climate and Natural Environment” Research Line.

Dr. Javier Martínez-López

Javier Martínez-López is a Biologist with a MSc on Freshwater Ecosystems Management and Assessment (University of Murcia, Spain) and a second MSc on Environmental Engineering and Consulting (EOI - Escuela de Organizacion Industrial, Spain). In 2014, he received his PhD in Ecology on the topic "Modelling and establishment of plant indicators of ecological status for semiarid mediterranean saline wetlands" from the Ecology and Hydrology department of the University of Murcia (Spain). His main research topics are landscape ecology, remote sensing, ecosystem services and spatio-temporal ecosystem modeling using several open source programming languages, such as R, Python and GRASS GIS. He worked on several projects at the Ecology and Hydrology department of the University of Murcia (Spain), such as the 'Integrated Modelling for the Sustainable Management of the Mar Menor lagoon', the 'Application of the European Water Framework and the Natura 2000 Network on the Segura Basin' and the 'Millenium Ecosystem Asessment in Spain'. He has also been coordinating several international environmental projects as a project manager at ttz-Bremerhaven (Germany). He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission working in Ispra (Italy) on the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas developing spatial biophysical habitat models and indicators for monitoring the state and pressures of protected areas globally.