European islands are hotspots of biological and cultural diversity, which, compared to mainland, are more vulnerable to climate change, tourism development, uncontrolled land use changes and financial crisis. These factors have increasingly resulted in severe impacts on socio-economic and environmental services. Projected climate and land use change will impact on islands’ biodiversity but also on ecosystem services and in turn on the quality of life of island inhabitants. Even if the existing techniques can adequately predict climate-induced ecological changes of the larger islands, this is not the case for small and medium size islands where there is a need for refinement.

Although ecosystem services (ES) assessments have been carried out worldwide in different geographical areas, islands are still underrepresented. Despite the islands’s importance and vulnerability, efforts to date have focused solely on the pressures they face. Still we know little about ES supplies, flows and demands and their spatio-temporal variability, whilst integrated approaches that consider ES cross island realms (terrestrial, marine and their interface) remain scarce. Moreover, the current conceptual approaches guiding ES mapping and assessment need further refinement to account for the complex manifestations of nature and culture arising from peoples’ interaction with island spaces.

The aim of this action is to provide a platform for coordinated interdisciplinary research on several aspects of mapping and assessment of ES in small and medium European Islands in order to synthesize and strengthen the knowledge base for conservation of island realms and contribute to their sustainable development.

With a focus on island ecosystem services, SMILES seeks to:

• Synthesise current knowledge of the role of islands as ES suppliers by facilitating a critical assessment of our current knowledge and understanding of island ecosystems services; capacities, flows, and sustainability of ecosystem services use; and their future trends.
• Convey and share knowledge among scientists, policy makers and stakeholders from different scientific disciplines, geographical regions and management contexts to understand the role of islands ecosystems services.
• Develop an integrated framework (including methods, guidelines, tools) to support the holistic assessment of ecosystem services in islands
• Support Science-Policy-Society (SPS) based best practices Improve understanding through cross-country and cross-sector knowledge integration towards a set of best practices to better evaluate the effects of cumulative stressors in island systems, such as climate and land use changes.
• Employ participatory processes, in order to adapt, use and validate indicators and identify tipping points of island systems to be used by policy makers in local, national or international regulations about ecosystem services on small-medium islands.
• Generate proposals with simulated outputs on concrete applications of nature-based solutions for the sustainable development of selected islands (case studies).