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Comparative community case studies as research tools: A national effort to support local sustainability planning
Citation:
Harwell, M., R. Fulford, Ted DeWitt, M. Russell, S. Yee, J. Hoffman, Bob Mckane, AND Tim Canfield. Comparative community case studies as research tools: A national effort to support local sustainability planning. CERF 2015, Portland, OR, November 08 - 12, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
Poster presentation at the CERF 2015 conference
Description:
The provisioning of aquatic ecosystem goods and services (EGS) is a key concept in USEPA Office of Research and Development research programs. This is a national issue, yet many decisions affecting EGS sustainability are made at the local level where decisions can have substantial influence on EGS. The Sustainable and Healthy Communities research program develops tools and approaches to help local decision making. Here we describe a coordinated case study approach that focuses on the transferability, scalability, and utility (TSU) of selected tools and approaches across communities of different types. Transferability refers to how well tools are can be applied in different systems, scalability refers to how well tools are applied across issues at different spatial and temporal scales, and utility refers to how well tools and approaches are adopted and used by local decision makers. The objective is to explore how communities approach decision making associated with resource sustainability and how this information can be used to structure decision support. For this effort, decision support has four elements: decision context, stakeholder engagement, predictive tools, and measures of human benefit. Each element is examined independently based on the TSU paradigm and then they are examined synergistically as a complete approach for decision support. Water resources is a common case study thread, with a number of locations in coastal and estuarine settings. The output will be approaches to link environmental data and tools that predict the impact of human-induced change on EGS with community characteristics and priorities that drive decisions. The desired outcome is for communities to have available a suite of tools and approaches for decision support that provide metrics applicable for local level decisions, but also have flexibility to consider and incorporate unique community characteristics when necessary to facilitate broad stakeholder engagement.