You are here:
The Importance of Context in Development and Application of Ecosystem Services Production Functions
Citation:
Russell, M., R. Fulford, AND S. Yee. The Importance of Context in Development and Application of Ecosystem Services Production Functions. A Community on Ecosystem Services, Washington, DC, December 08 - 12, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation for ACES conference
Description:
The task of estimating ecosystem service production and delivery deserves special attention. When approached as a function of land cover at any given time, context driven facets of ecosystem service production, delivery, and resulting effects on human well-being can be overlooked. These include the potential dependence of production on ecosystem condition, processes or scale; its susceptibility to stressors; as well as beneficiary driven influences on valuation of said production. Modeling can help overcome these problems, but raises new issues of how models fit when applied in different contexts than they were originally designed. The context within which ecosystem services production functions are determined is itself multifaceted; including social as well as environmental factors. Here, ecosystem services production modeling approaches, and the context of modeling, are examined using case study assessments in Florida and Puerto Rico. In Tampa, population growth over the next 20-50 years is expected to bring large changes in regional land use and a key management objective is to plan for these changes in the context of maximizing ecosystem service production from natural capitol, particularly from the adjacent bay. In Southwestern Puerto Rico, a watershed management plan is currently being implemented to reduce threats of sedimentation to declining quality of coral reefs. However recent workshops with stakeholders indicated there is still a great deal of uncertainty on the degree to which proposed actions could benefit the local community, including unintended benefits or tradeoffs to the provisioning of ecosystem services in the watershed. These varied examples help inform our understanding of how context influences the application of ecosystem services production modeling, and helps position it within the larger project of understanding how environmental change affects human well-being.