Citation:

Branoff, B., S. Yee, G. Cicchetti, M. Pryor, AND S. Jackson. FROM BIOLOGICAL CONDITION TO ECOSYSTEM SERVICES: ASSESSING THE VALUE OF HABITAT PRESENCE TO MASSBAYS COMMUNTIES. Center for Watershed Protection’s Coastal and Island Conference, Gulf Breeze (Virtual), Florida, November 16 - 17, 2020.

Impact/Purpose:

This work links the structure and function of an ecosystem to a measure of the resulting provisioning of ecosystem services. The Biological condition Gradient (BCG) has been developed as one measure of an ecosystem's integrity, and thus its function. But the BCG has not yet been linked to ecosystem services. This work involves collaborations with local stakeholders in defining a system's BCG and then using available datasets to connect the BCG with a reflective Ecosystem Services Gradient (ESG). With the use of standardized national datasets, this methodology can be applied nationwide and over long time periods. Together with the input from local stakeholders, this work has the potential to impact local communities nationwide, providing a tool for improving human well-being through ecosystem management.

Description:

Over the past two decades, the Biological Condition Gradient (BCG) has been developed as a consistent metric of ecosystem health and integrity, and has been used in a variety of systems to assess levels of biological condition towards effective ecosystem management. Building on this concept, the Ecosystem Services Gradient links the BCG to a similarly consistent and effective means of evaluating the influence of biological condition on human health and well-being via the provisioning of ecosystem services. In doing so, the ESG allows managers to understand how to achieve optimal ecosystem services provisioning through changes in environmental and biological conditions. It also allows for the weighing of potential tradeoffs and co-occuring benefits under various BCG scenarios. Here, we develop an ESG for the MassBays National Estuary Program, encompassing 1100 miles of Massachusetts coastline and including 47 separate estuarine embayments and 50 coastal communities. We employ an ecosystem services matrix to assign a relative provisioning capacity value to coastal ecosystems and explore how changes in the landscape ultimately influence the provisioning of ecosystem goods and services to the MassBays communities. We find that while tradeoffs do exist, expanding the presence of coastal habitats, especially coastal wetlands, results in the optimum provisioning of ecosystem services. We plan to build upon this work by deploying the ESG model to different coastal systems, each with different definitions of the BCG and different priority goods and services. Ultimately, we hope to build an ESG model capable of utilizing publicly available national datasets to assess the provisioning of goods and services across the country’s coastal communities.

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