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Ecosystem Services: Developing strategic focus for U.S. EPA’s Ecological Research Program
Citation:
CANFIELD, TIM AND R. A. LINTHURST. Ecosystem Services: Developing strategic focus for U.S. EPA’s Ecological Research Program. Presented at The 19th Annual SETAC Meeting, Goteborg, SWEDEN, May 28 - June 04, 2009.
Impact/Purpose:
Understanding that the protection and enhancement of ecosystem services can help maintain and improve human health, economic vitality, and overall well-being, the ESRP will develop tools that enable planners and decision-makers at local, regional, and national levels to better understand how society’s choices affect the provision of these services.
Description:
U.S. EPA’s Office of Research and Development has made ecosystem services the new strategic focus for its Ecological Services Research Program (ESRP). Understanding that the protection and enhancement of ecosystem services can help maintain and improve human health, economic vitality, and overall well-being, the ESRP will develop tools that enable planners and decision-makers at local, regional, and national levels to better understand how society’s choices affect the provision of these services. The ESRP will use a tripartite approach to address research needs on ecosystem services. The first programmatic focus area will be a set of place-based studies that serve as test-beds for development of analysis methods and web-based, decision-support tools. Alternative-future scenarios, reflecting local, regional, national or global drivers of change, will be used to examine potential ecological, human-health, and economic outcomes. The second programmatic focus area will be wetland ecosystems, with the goal of understanding what bundled ecosystem services are provided and how these can best be protected, enhanced or restored. The third programmatic focus area will be nitrogen, with the goal of understanding how this pollutant affects the delivery of desired ecosystem services at multiple (local, regional, national, global) scales. These emphases will be supported by core research on ecosystem processes, modeling, and restoration. The Office of Research and Development will form partnerships with economists and health scientists, within and outside EPA, to develop approaches for quantifying services and to conduct research on valuation and restoration approaches that adequately describe the trade-offs involved when multiple decision options are available.
