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Documenting Public Values for River Ecosystem Services
Citation:
Weber, M. Documenting Public Values for River Ecosystem Services. Presented at OSU, Water Resosurces Graduate Program Seminar Series, Corvallis, OR, October 22, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation will summarize Final Ecosystem Goods and Services theory as well as supporting qualitative and quantitative research for members of the Oregon State University community. The perspective of how nature supports human well-being, and that humans therefore need to make subjective management choices in the best overall interest of society, will be stressed. This is contrary to a point-of-view that environmental management is best left to experts alone. Research in the Southwestern U.S. will be used to illustrate how to understand what is important to people about rivers and streams, and then how to quantify those preferences in follow-up survey research. Such quantified values can then be a component of cost-benefit accounting for river management.
Description:
The value to society of environmental changes is difficult to assess, and thus challenging to include in environmental management decisions. This presentation will first provide an overview of how framing these values in an ecosystem services perspective can facilitate the process of both measuring and evaluating societal values of environmental change. These topics will then be illustrated using a case study focused on ecosystem services related to aquatic resources in the Southwestern U.S. The advantages of using both qualitative and quantitative research methods to identify and measure policy relevant ecosystem services will be illustrated with real world data.