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Lessons learned in applying ecosystem goods and services to community decision making
Citation:
Fulford, R., Randy Bruins, Tim Canfield, J. Handy, JohnM Johnston, P. Ringold, M. Russell, N. Seeteram, K. Winters, AND S. Yee. Lessons learned in applying ecosystem goods and services to community decision making. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-16/136, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
This report explores lessons learned applying an ecosystem goods and services approach to community decision making in a series of place-based studies. The result is a clarification and roadmap for improving community decision support through the identification of successes and gaps in application in need of further development and study. This report also proposes a conceptual approach to community decision support to aid in structuring future work.
Description:
This report is intended to describe lessons learned from the application of FEGS-based research in a series of PBS conducted by EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) and make this information available and useful for planning future research into local decision support for sustainability. A key goal of this report is to break the FEGS concept into a series of steps, called the “FEGS approach,” and examine how each of these steps may, or may not, have been applied in prior PBS. To begin, we introduce a general model of local decision making based on the EGS concept. This conceptual model represents a guidance tool for future research. This report concerns existing and past placed-based research in ORD with the objective of describing how this research has (or has not) applied the elements of our EGS-based conceptual model for decision support. The data used for this analysis of EGS use in place-based studies comes from an information request sent out to project and task leads throughout the EPA Office of Research and Development. A total of 25 place-based studies participated in the data request. These sites are distributed throughout the continental US and Puerto Rico and cover a spatial scale from individual municipalities to watersheds containing multiple communities. The data request was organized into four chapters, each corresponding to chapters of the report (Decision Context/Stakeholder Engagement, Final Ecosystem Goods and Services [FEGS], Ecological Production Functions [EPF], and Human Benefits).