Identifying priority ecosystem services in tidal wetland restoration.
Citation:
Jackson, C., C. Hernandez, S. Yee, M. Nash, H. Diefenderfer, A. Borde, M. Harwell, AND T. DeWitt. Identifying priority ecosystem services in tidal wetland restoration. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Frontiers, Lausanne, Switzerland, 12:1260447, (2024). https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2024.1260447
Impact/Purpose:
Wetland restoration programs have commonly mentioned people as beneficiaries of the restoration yet those benefits are not explicitly define or mention in most restoration monitoring plans. This can lead to a lack of public support or a failure to achieve desired beneficial use outcomes. This project presents a top-down, literature content-analysis approach to identify beneficiaries or users of tidal wetlands and prioritize ecosystem services of greatest relevance to them, based on extracting information from existing documents. The results provided ecosystem services that were prioritized based on interests described by organizations within regions of interest that were charged with stewarding and restoring wetlands and informed by their stakeholders. Such lists can be used in future restoration projects to inform: 1) goal setting by identifying socially relevant restoration goals; 2) metrics identification and development based on these goals; and 3) stakeholder engagement and communication with restoration practitioners.
Description:
Classification systems can be an important tool for identifying and quantifying the importance of relationships, assessing spatial patterns in a standardized way, and forecasting alternative decision scenarios to characterize the potential benefits (e.g., ecosystem services) from ecosystem restoration that improve human health and well-being. We present a top-down approach that systematically leverages ecosystem services classification systems to identify potential services relevant for ecosystem restoration decisions. We demonstrate this approach using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Ecosystem Service Classification System Plus (NESCS Plus) to identify those ecosystem services that are relevant to restoration of tidal wetlands. We selected tidal wetland management documents from federal agencies, state agencies, wetland conservation organizations, and land stewards across three regions of the continental United States (northern Gulf of Mexico, Mid-Atlantic, and Pacific Northwest) to examine regional and organizational differences in identified potential benefits of tidal wetland restoration activities and the potential user groups who may benefit. We used an automated document analysis to quantify the frequencies at which different wetland types were mentioned in the management documents along with their associated beneficiary groups and the ecological end products (EEPs) those beneficiaries care about, as defined by NESCS Plus. Results showed that the top combination across all three regions, all four organizations, and all four tidal wetland types was the EEP naturalness paired with the beneficiary people who care (existence). Overall, the Mid-Atlantic region and the land steward organizations mentioned ecosystem services more than the others, and EEPs were mentioned in combination with tidal wetlands as a high-level, more general category than the other more specific tidal wetland types. Those results may be useful in identifying ecosystem services-related goals for tidal wetland restoration. This approach for identifying and comparing ecosystem service priorities is broadly transferrable to other ecosystems or decision-making contexts.
