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Applying ecological function in environmental decision making (II)
Citation:
Fulford, R., J. Hagy, AND M. Russell. Applying ecological function in environmental decision making (II). Ecological Forecasting Initiative, Washington, DC, May 13 - 15, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation of research will help inform the broader scientific community of EPA contributions to decision making to support human health and the environment. Understanding how to use scientific information for decision making is an important step to operationalizing information and making it useful. A key step in this process to translating scientific information into the language of policy. Here we describe a process successfully applied in marine fishery management and use a case study example approach to demonstrate how it can be applied to the broader issue of ecosystem management. The outcome is an identifiable pathway for application of an existing, well-regarded approach for decision making to a different and challenging management issue.
Description:
The Final ecosystem goods and services (FEGS) concept has become increasingly valuable for identifying and evaluating important trade-offs in estuarine management, yet the translation of FEGS science into policy is limited by a need for meaningful reference points that facilitate forecasting policy outcomes. A research priority for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to develop methods for incorporation of FEGS into decision making to protect human health and the environment. Here we present a case study application of methods to translate available science into decision thresholds based on important FEGS in estuarine systems. Thresholds in function delivery are a necessary part of making scientific information useful to decision makers as a tool for forecasting impacts. Such thresholds can be defined based on functional equivalency (FE) of ecosystem components. For any given FEGS, we can identify ecosystem components that contribute to its production and then define that contribution as a target function. When management decisions are predicted to result in change in FEGS production, the function has changed. A threshold can be defined beyond which a change in function results in a loss of FEGS production enough to say the ecosystem is no longer functionally equivalent to the desired state. Decision makers need both a measure of the reduction in function, as well as the meaningful reference point to make use of scientific information. Forecasting changes in FE is well established in fishery management and has been linked implicitly to resource sustainability. In the broader ecological case, the FE paradigm is used but not well defined as an operational concept. Our goal is to provide a conceptual map for the FE paradigm to questions of habitat management and nutrient load management and explore meaningful and measurable thresholds for forecasting change in coastal estuaries.