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An Approach for Identifying and Quantifying Priority Ecosystem Services
Citation:
Sharpe, L. AND S. Yee. An Approach for Identifying and Quantifying Priority Ecosystem Services. Society for Ecosystem Restoration in Northern BC Webinar, Virtual, N/A, CANADA, May 19, 2026.
Impact/Purpose:
An organization of environmental management professionals is interested in learning more about tools and approaches that we have developed. This presentation will spread awareness of this work and encourage adoption of our publicly released decision support tools.
Description:
Ecosystem goods and services (EGS) are powerful concepts to use in the making and communicating of environmental management decisions because of the way they connect changes in the environment to changes in the stakeholders’ experiences. But describing these EGS and the potential impacts that differing management scenarios could have on them is a complex challenge. First, decision makers must be able to identify EGS that are relevant and meaningful to their stakeholder groups. This includes understanding the ways in which stakeholder groups benefit from the environment and what they need in order to realize those benefits. Those benefits are best described as as combinations of environmental attributes rather than isolated elements – for fishermen to recreate they need more than fish to catch, they also need water of sufficient quality for safe contact, the space to fish, and they would likely want some degree of aesthetic site appeal. To best describe how a management action could impact the single EGS of recreational fishing the constellation of individual attributes must be identified, their relative importance weighted, and the potential impacts to each described. The Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Scoping Tool was developed to provide a transparent, repeatable, defendable approach for identifying priority ecosystem goods and services and the Ecosystem Service Gradient was developed to provide an approach for describing the production and delivery of EGS in a holistic manner, relevant to the human experience. This approach for identifying and quantifying priority ecosystem services can facilitate consideration of impacts to ecosystem services into management and decision making.