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Mapping ecosystem services in a Great Lakes estuary supports local decision-making
Citation:
Angradi, T., Dave Bolgrien, AND J. Launspach. Mapping ecosystem services in a Great Lakes estuary supports local decision-making. IAGLER, Burlington, VT, May 25 - 29, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
The purpose of this presentation is to provide details to great lakes Scientific community about ongoing ecosystem services research that is applicable elsewhere in Great Lakes Coastal Ecosystems
Description:
Estuaries of the Laurentian Great Lakes provide a concentrated supply of ecosystem goods and services from which humans benefit. As long-term centers of human activity, most estuaries of the Great Lakes and have a legacy of chemical contamination, degraded habitats, and non-point-source pollution, which reduce the benefits current and future human communities receive from estuary ecosystems. In this paper, we bring a GIS-based ecosystem service mapping approach into the context of local estuary management. We describe an empirical method for examining how local-scale human actions can affect spatial variation in the supply of 26 different ecosystem services from the St. Louis River Estuary of Lake Superior. This service-mapping approach is based on simple, spatially explicit GIS models and other data sources that allow us to map the spatial distribution of ecosystem goods and services (or their proxies) across the estuary at spatial scales amenable to examining tradeoffs and fostering deliberation among managers and stakeholders. The views expressed in this abstract are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the US EPA