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Fishing for Novel Approaches to Ecosystem Service Forecasts
Citation:
MCGARVEY, D. J. Fishing for Novel Approaches to Ecosystem Service Forecasts. Presented at Society for Conservation Biology 2008 Annual Meeting, Chattanooga, TN, July 13 - 17, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
The overall objective is to develop modeling and decision support capabilities that allow environmental managers and planners to protect, conserve, and restore aquatic habitats and species.
Description:
The ecosystem service concept provides a powerful framework for conserving species and the environments they depend upon. Describing current distributions of ecosystem services and forecasting their future distributions have therefore become central objectives in many conservation and management efforts. For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently testing methods that will allow it to forecast the productivity of multiple inland and estuarine fisheries, and to anticipate their associated services. One approach within EPA is to combine independently developed models of water quality, physical habitat, and fish production within a common computing environment, and to use the linked systems to assess a variety of alternative futures scenarios. This mechanistic, integrated approach facilitates rigorous sensitivity and uncertainty analyses, but its applicability is constrained by the data-intensive parameterization process. Alternatively, a pattern-based, macroecological strategy is being used to characterize fisheries at broad spatial and temporal scales. This empirical approach is less powerful than the mechanistic one, but can be readily implemented in any area of interest with existing, national-coverage datasets. To illustrate the benefits, tradeoffs, and mechanics of the latter method, I present a fisheries services model of the Albemarle-Pamlico River System in eastern Virginia and North Carolina (USA).