WHAT ECOSYSTEM SERVICES MATTER?: THE FEGS COMMUNITY SCOPING TOOL
Citation:
Sharpe, L. AND C. Horstmann. WHAT ECOSYSTEM SERVICES MATTER?: THE FEGS COMMUNITY SCOPING TOOL. A Community on Ecosystem Services: ACES 2022, District of Columbia, DC, December 12 - 15, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
The concept of final ecosystem goods and services (FEGS) are the aspects of the environment directly enjoyed, used, or consumed by humans. The central feature of FEGS is that ecosystems are viewed through the diverse ways people directly benefit from them. The USEPA has developed classification systems for these services, the latest version is the National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS) Plus. The standardization made available by NESCS Plus allows other tools and databases developed with NESCS Plus categories to interact. This session provides an overview of USEPA-developed tools useful for implementing ecosystem services analysis. While these tools have been developed separately, they all use categories from NESCS Plus. This consistency allows tool users to smoothly move from one to another and build upon the results from each to answer a variety of questions for decision makers. The FEGS Community Scoping Tool helps users determine what ecosystem services are relevant to a decision by harnessing FEGS understanding to enable communities to understand the relative importance of beneficiaries relevant to a decision and biophysical aspects of the environment of direct relevance to those beneficiaries. The FEGS Metrics Report can then provide guidance on how to measure and monitor those priority services. The EnviroAtlas, a powerful tool containing geospatial data and other resources related to ecosystem services, chemical and non-chemical stressors, and human health, and the EcoService Models Library, a database of ecosystem models, contain crosswalks from NESCS Plus that allow users to map and model those priority services. Each of these tools is valuable on their own, but together they provide a powerful approach to easily incorporate ecosystem services into decision-making in ways that are relevant to stakeholders. This talk is one of five that aim to present each of these tools and their collective power at the upcoming ACES meeting.
Description:
Human well-being relies on goods and services provided by ecosystems to sustain our society, human health, and economy. These benefits from nature are often overlooked or taken for granted in decision making. Decision and policy makers struggle to protect and manage natural habitats and resources while balancing conflicting interests across a diverse group of human users. By beginning with the decision’s pertinent stakeholder groups and identifying the ways in which they directly benefit from the environment (i.e, the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS)), managers can weigh the impacts to relevant FEGS when determining management actions. It is easy to focus on FEGS that are frequently measured (e.g., land area available for recreation) or commonly discussed (e.g., carbon sequetration) without considering whether they are: (1) highly relevant to the decision context; (2) meaningful to or desired by stakeholders; and (3) of direct benefit to stakeholders. The FEGS Community Scoping Tool is designed to help community-level decision makers make decisions by identifying and prioritizing stakeholders, the ways in which they use the environment, and biophysical attributes of nature that they use. The structured decision-making tool helps to clearly identify the highest priority FEGS for their decision context in a transparent, repeatable process. The relevant attributes can then be used to evaluate decision alternatives for environmental managers and answer questions posed by economists and social scientists on how environmental benefits support human well-being. If environmental issues are considered alongside social and economic consequences, wiser decisions and better outcomes can satisfy more stakeholders with competing interests.
