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Mapping benefits as a tool for natural resource management in estuarine watersheds
Citation:
Murphy, K., M. Russell, AND R. Fulford. Mapping benefits as a tool for natural resource management in estuarine watersheds. Gulf Estuarine Research Society (GERS) Fall 2016 Meeting, Pensacola Beach, FL, November 03 - 05, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Describes the use of H2O tool to determine benefits of proposed land use change and inform land use decision making in estuarine watersheds.
Description:
Natural resource managers are often called upon to justify the value of protecting or restoring natural capital based on its perceived benefit to stakeholders. This usually takes the form of formal valuation exercises (i.e., ancillary costs) of a resource without consideration for who is using it. This disconnect between resource availability and resource use can play a role in stakeholder resistance to management actions. Communities can benefit from tools that allow management decisions to be evaluated in terms of what is being protected, what human benefits are related to that protection and who ultimately would receive those benefits. The EPA H2O Tool uses an ecosystem services approach to generate maps of ecosystem value focusing on where services are provided on the map and how those services are delivered to stakeholders. A case-study application of the tool combined human population distribution and elevation data with estimates of ecosystem service production value to assess the spatial arrangement produced by their interaction. Individual ecosystem services are evaluated differently. Since air pollution removal is a locally delivered service, its value per capita was determined by weighting the air pollution removal value in a buffered area surrounding and overlapping a population of beneficiaries. Flood protection is delivered via water flow patterns to beneficiaries in downstream flood zones, so its value per capita was weighted by elevation. We make several pairwise comparisons that demonstrate how the distribution of people, their density and location in relation to service provision, weight the value of delivered service. These comparisons illustrate how higher flood zone population densities at lower elevations can result in increased delivered service value relative to their provision while areas with lower population densities and higher elevation may not be able to benefit as much. However, the differences in supply between urban and rural lands are commonly offset by corresponding differences in the density of population served. In conclusion, restoration of services located in upstream or interspersed within more highly populated areas have an increased potential to maximize total realized human benefit.