Grantee Research Project Results
2018 Progress Report: Human health, ecosystem services, and their economic value as part of sustainability assessment for the Sacramento region
EPA Grant Number: R836938Title: Human health, ecosystem services, and their economic value as part of sustainability assessment for the Sacramento region
Investigators: Huber, Patrick , Hollander, Allan , Riggle, Courtney , Miller, Daphne , Quinn, Jim , Srivastava, Lorie , Lange, Matthew , Baker, Matthew
Current Investigators: Huber, Patrick , Hollander, Allan , Lange, Matthew , Miller, Daphne , Quinn, Jim , Riggle, Courtney , Srivastava, Lorie , Baker, Matthew
Institution: University of California - Davis
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: August 1, 2017 through July 31, 2019 (Extended to July 31, 2020)
Project Period Covered by this Report: August 1, 2017 through July 31,2018
Project Amount: $593,348
RFA: Integrating Human Health and Well-Being with Ecosystem Services (2016) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Human Health
Objective:
Systematic land use planning for sustainability does not typically include human health and well-being as explicit inputs. This project tests the effects of including issues related to human health, ecosystem services, and community wellbeing on the outputs of a standard land use planning process which is primarily focused on environmental variables.
This project convenes a new group of stakeholders that will augment the current group (focused on natural resources) and provide input on which issues and metrics are of greatest salience given the regional context. Ontologies are being developed that link these issues and metrics to existing ontologies describing links between agricultural and land use data types. Data will be gathered to support these metrics where available and gaps in data availability tracked. These data will be used to undertake spatially-explicit land use optimization assessments using Marxan software under multiple future land use scenarios. Outputs from these assessments will be compared to those currently being developed as well as to existing general land use plans. Valuations of appropriate ecosystem services will be used to quantify these comparisons. A workflow is being developed to track the proposed project and to make the methods available throughout California. The researchers will work with stakeholders to apply the project's findings to a range of local use cases that could benefit from “health sensitive” land use planning and sustainability strategies.
The project will result in a regional stakeholder group that includes human health and well-being experts and advocates. The team will collaborate with the stakeholders to produce health-agriculture-environmental ontologies. A comparison between optimized land use patterns will be enabled across future land use scenarios and sets of sustainability issues analyzed. Ecosystem service valuations will be assessed for the region under the land use modeling outputs. A generalizable workflow will be created enabling use of the methods developed here in other regions and states.
Progress Summary:
Work completed over the past year has focused on developing the conceptual and data structures to support the stakeholder process. The team has expanded the base set of ontologies to more fully enable a structured stakeholder process and the capture of crucial information from this process.
Outputs
Stakeholder list. Drawing from a variety of existing sources, the project compiled a database containing 455 individual actors in the Sacramento region that could play a potential role as a stakeholder in the ongoing and future sustainability assessments. These individuals represent agricultural, environmental, and health sectors.
Partner Finder. The stakeholder database was used to develop an ontology to describe individual areas of expertise among potential stakeholders as well as relationships between individuals and organizations. This ontology is being used to create a “Partner Finder”, i.e. a structured process for identifying a small subset of individuals that collectively represent a wide range (as defined by the user) of perspectives across any given sustainability assessment process.
Health ontology survey/catalog. The team conducted a survey of existing health ontologies in order to identify a base set of formalized relationships that will be used in the next year to describe the linkages between human health and environmental variables in the Sacramento region. The formal ontologies discovered through this process were cataloged and the relevant information for this project described. Additionally, a conceptual model was developed for integrating landscape, lifescape, and foodscape ontologies.
Mapping elements of public health linked with environment. The team conducted a detailed literature review of public health publications to map linkages of health outcomes with environmental factors. These health issues and the correlated health and environmental indicators will be added to the existing issues/indicators website and their importance for the Sacramento region evaluated through the stakeholder process.
Sustainability issues/indicators website. The project has developed a new website to enable access to our existing sustainability issues and indicators database. This website allows for easy access to information about 357 issues and 2,069 indicators. The website is structured to highlight the interrelationships between issues and indicators, permitting simple navigation along the links between resources.
Planning for IC-FOODS conference. The 2019 IC-FOODS Conference will be a gathering of researchers and others focused on exploring the linkages between food, health, the environment, and new technologies. The project team is helping to develop the program for this conference. As part of this, the researchers are planning a session presenting the project at the conference. This conference will take place in San Francisco and Davis, California March 22-25, 2019.
Draft workflow concept. The team developed a generalized, draft workflow conceptual diagram. This diagram captures the team’s understanding to date of the flow of information and activities over the full course of the project. While elaboration and refinement will occur over the next year, the diagram illustrates not only what the study has undertaken to this point in time and where the study expects the project to lead, but also how the researchers envision this type of analysis to proceed in other contexts.
PPOD Ontology. The researchers are developing a formal ontology to express the relationships between people, projects, organizations, and datasets (PPOD). This ontology will be used to help describe the stakeholders in the region, issues of interest to them, and pertinent datasets.
Outcomes
Food System Informatics program. There are several concurrent projects at UC Davis’s Agricultural Sustainability Institute (ASI) that include team members from this project, including an NSF-funded Research Coordination Network for the Sacramento Region through the Smart and Connected Communities program. These projects are all linked conceptually, geographically, or both. A decision was made at ASI that there is adequate substance and momentum between these projects to formalize this work within ASI. Therefore a Food System Informatics program has been added to the four other existing programs within ASI. This change in program structure allows greater information and personnel flow between existing projects.
Future Activities:
Full stakeholder process. Over the next project period, a full stakeholder process will take place to catalog the key public health challenges linked with environmental factors. The process will include interviews, focus groups, and in-person dialogue among diverse regional stakeholders to capture salient issues, indicators, and available data sets linking health and environment for the Sacramento region.
USDA proposal. A large grant proposal to the USDA Sustainable Agricultural Systems program was recently submitted that, if funded, will begin fall 2019 and build directly on elements achieved through this project. Several members of this EPA project team are part of the USDA SAS proposal.
Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 5 publications for this projectSupplemental Keywords:
sustainability, indicators, ontology, ecosystem services, Marxan, land use, health, human well-beingRelevant Websites:
An Expertise Ontology for Cooperative Extension Exit
Progress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.