You are here:
Linking Ecosystem Services Benefit Transfer Databases and Ecosystem Services Production Function Libraries
Citation:
Kochmer, J., Randy Bruins, C. Cooley, AND Ted DeWitt. Linking Ecosystem Services Benefit Transfer Databases and Ecosystem Services Production Function Libraries. A Community for Ecosystem Services, Washington, DC, December 08 - 12, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
A team of EPA scientists and economists from Earth Economics are exploring ways to link two databases that would result in a unique tool to assist communities and agencies with estimating the production and value of ecosystem services. Ecosystem goods and services are the functions and items produced by nature (i.e., natural capital) that humans benefit from. Measuring their production or their value can be difficult and expensive, yet communities need to understand how the production and benefits of ecosystem services changes in response to human activities or environmental change so that they may take proactive or retroactive steps to ensure their sustained delivery to the public. US EPA has been developing a database (Ecosystem Service Production Function Library) of ecological models that are useful for estimating the production ecosystem services. Earth Economics has been developing a database (Ecosystem Valuation Toolkit) of economic information on the value of ecosystem services. In this presentation, EPA and EE will present the results of preliminary efforts to link these two databases and to discuss the anticipated benefits of such a linkage.
Description:
The quantification or estimation of the economic and non-economic values of ecosystem services can be done from a number of distinct approaches. For example, practitioners may use ecosystem services production function models (ESPFMs) for a particular location, or alternatively, deploy benefit/function/values transfer to other areas of interest (such as with benefit transfer methodology). Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, but practitioners have tended to use one or the other approach. This presentation will discuss a collaboration between the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Earth Economics (EE) to explore the possible practical utility of cross-linking information about ESPFM and benefit transfer databases. In particular, we will share approaches EPA and EE have taken toward and progress to-date in the course of exploring cross-linking of EPA's ESPF-L (Ecosystem Services Production Function Library) and EE’s Ecosystem Valuation Toolkit (EVT).