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Designing a systematic landscape monitoring approach for quantifying ecosystem services
Citation:
LANDERS, D. H., P. L. RINGOLD, AND J. Boyd. Designing a systematic landscape monitoring approach for quantifying ecosystem services. Presented at ESP International Conference, Salzau, GERMANY, June 07 - 11, 2010.
Impact/Purpose:
A key problem encountered early on by governments striving to incorporate the ecosystem services concept into decision making is quantifying ecosystem services across large landscapes.
Description:
A key problem encountered early on by governments striving to incorporate the ecosystem services concept into decision making is quantifying ecosystem services across large landscapes. Basically, they are faced with determining what to measure, how to measure it and how to aggregate these data up to Regional and National scales. An important goal for scientists working on this level of ecosystem service implementation is to create a measurement and monitoring system that is systematic, complete, robust and that avoids double counting. We have approached this problem by beginning with identifying indicators of Final Ecosystem Services (Boyd and Banzhaf, 2007) for users and attributes associated with specific ecosystem categories. Final Ecosystem Services or Endpoints are those biophysical measures, conditions, and features that require little further translation to make clear their relevance to wellbeing (for a specific user). We began this work by focusing on one Ecosystem Category, Streams, in a workshop setting containing a mix of natural and social scientists (Ringold, et al. 2009). We are now in the process of expanding this approach to include the additional ecosystem categories of wetland and estuaries. Concurrently, we are exploring important elements of a framework, design and sampling approach for a national ecosystem services monitoring effort. We will present some of the options we are considering and how we envision combining modeling and monitoring to quantify ecosystem services at large scales.