You are here:
Connecting Ecosystem Service Production to Users as a Measure of Realized Benefits in Coastal Communities
Citation:
Russell, M., J. Bousquin, R. Fulford, AND S. Yee. Connecting Ecosystem Service Production to Users as a Measure of Realized Benefits in Coastal Communities. To be Presented at Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation Biannual Meeting, Providence, RI, November 05 - 09, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
To present new methods and results for ecosystem goods and service assessment to the science community for initial feedback before publication
Description:
Ecosystem goods and services are often produced in locations far away from where humans benefit from them. Human beneficiaries also use specific spatial pathways to access the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS), the ecological endpoints directly beneficial to human well-being, produced via intermediate ecological, geological and meteorological processes. Combining spatial information on these access pathways with our current understanding of FEGS production pathways is essential for quantitative assessment and valuation. Such assessments further our qualitative understanding of how FEGS are currently or could become beneficial to humans. Here we take advantage of the National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS) beneficiary and use typology to identify spatial access pathways for each beneficiary class (i.e. each combination of beneficiary type and how they use each ecological endpoint). Once identified, those access pathways were used to develop a land use/cover schema necessary for assessing how much potential FEGS production becomes realized benefits. This schema involves adding info on how each land use/cover type’s FEGS production is spatially accessed and used by each beneficiary. Spatial distributions of potential FEGS supply are then combined with a weighting factor derived from this presence or quality of related access pathway information. Here, we combined land cover classes with the four production pathways (i.e. In-situ, or via terrestrial, atmospheric, and hydrologic connectivity networks) to calculate the spatial distribution of potential FEGS supply weighted using the presence or strength of the four access pathways (i.e. in-situ, via transportation networks with and without the presence of other complementary goods and services, or non-proximal via knowledge networks) to develop a set of map layers consistent with the concept of benefit relevant indicators (BRI’s). These map layers require information on two factors (i.e. Biophysical endpoints or FEGS supply, and the degree of user access to that supply). We demonstrate the versatility of our FEGS assessment methods by applying them to coastal community scale use cases.