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The role of place-based projects as ecosystem service laboratories
Citation:
LANDERS, D. H., D. W. EBERT, R. B. MCKANE, M. G. JOHNSON, J. E. COMPTON, W. E. HOGSETT, D. L. PHILLIPS, D. WHITE, BROOKS, AND P. T. RYGIEWICZ. The role of place-based projects as ecosystem service laboratories. Presented at Ecosystem Services Symposium, Naples, FL, December 08 - 11, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
Successfully addressing the increasingly complex ecological problems throughout the United States requires an integrative and innovative approach.
Description:
Successfully addressing the increasingly complex ecological problems throughout the United States requires an integrative and innovative approach. In this regard, the concept of ecosystem services has emerged as a promising approach for improving environmental decision making. Within the USEPA Ecological Services Research Program, a set of place-based studies are being implemented to explore a wide range of attributes associated with ecosystem services. The places were selected to capture within region gradients of the broad scale drivers of climate, N deposition, and human population. Moreover, the study sites provide unique associations of community and stakeholder involvement not typically included in traditional ecological research. The community and stakeholder context of ecosystem services for these study sites is as variable as the landscapes, climates and management regimes in which they are located. Presently, there are four place-based studies within the ERP: The Future Midwest Landscapes, Coastal Carolinas, Tampa Bay and Willamette Ecosystem Service Projects. The mixture of sites provides an opportunity to investigate multiple components of variability and predictability under relatively defined, and in some cases manipulated, systems and landscapes. While various sites have different foci, a common set of services will act as the starting point for evaluating societal/ecological issues and provide the scientific data and knowledge necessary to move ecosystems services from the concept realm to that of implementable policy. We explore the nature of this place-based approach using the Willamette Ecosystem Service Project as an example of approaches to investigating ecosystem services to address such issues as mapping, developing response functions between ecosystem services and forcing variables, bundling ecosystem services, valuation, spatial scaling and linking societal needs to ecosystem services via decision support tools.