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National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS Plus)
Citation:
Newcomer-Johnson, T., F. Andrews, J. Corona, Ted DeWitt, M. Harwell, C. Rhodes, P. Ringold, M. Russell, P. Sinha, AND G. Van Houtven. National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS Plus). U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-20/267, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
There is a need for interdisciplinary collaboration between ecologist and economists for improved systems approaches to environmental management. EPA has developed the National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS Plus) to serve as a framework for analyzing how changes to ecosystems impact human welfare. This classification system provides standardized vocabulary, classes, and codes. The aim is for this classification system to serve as a common language to improve communication, integration, and synthesis. For example, NESCS Plus has been linked to multiple EPA products including existing tools (e.g., EnviroAtlas and the EcoService Models Library).
Description:
This system is named NESCS Plus because it augments the original NESCS 4-component framework (USEPA, 2015) with a 5th component, the Beneficiary list from the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Classification System (FEGS-CS; Landers and Nahlik, 2013). A key feature of this classification systems is that it focuses on “final ecosystem services”, as well as “final ecosystem goods” that are the source of these services. The main purpose of NESCS Plus is to serve as a framework for analyzing how changes to ecosystems impact human welfare. This system can aid in the analysis of different types of environmental management actions, policies, and regulations. Quantifying and (as feasible) valuing how changes in ecosystems affect human well-being first requires identification of the relevant FES by answering the following four questions: Where? What? How? and Who?.
URLs/Downloads:
NESCS PLUS FINAL REPORT_MW_1-20-21_TAGGED.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 5929.191 KB, about PDF)National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS) Plus