Citation:

Sharpe, L., J. Bousquin, M. Harwell, C. Jackson, AND M. Russell. FEGS Community Scoping Tool. National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration, New Orleans, Louisiana, August 26 - 30, 2018.

Impact/Purpose:

The purpose of this work is to give an oral presentation to the National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration. The impact will be to introduce ecosystem services assessment tools to the ecosystem restoration community of practice.

Description:

One way of viewing ecosystem restoration projects is from a lens of reestablishing Ecosystem Goods and Services (EGS) that can provide valuable benefits from the environment to people. However, different restoration actions can result in restoring differing sets of EGS and, subsequently, people receiving differing sets of benefits. By working with those stakeholder groups most relevant to a restoration decision and identifying the EGS of greatest interest to them, managers can tailor their restoration actions to focus on restoring those EGS that are most desired. Too often, it is easy to focus on those EGS that are easily measured (e.g., land area available for recreation) or commonly discussed (e.g., carbon sequestration) without considering whether they are: (1) highly relevant to the restoration effort; (2) meaningful to or desired by stakeholders; and (3) of direct benefit to stakeholders. We propose the use of a structured decision making tool that allows community-level decision makers and restoration practitioners to take a transparent, repeatable, and defendable approach for identifying the highest priority EGS for their restoration actions. The structured decision making tool helps them explicitly identify and prioritize those benefiting from restored EGS and the EGS most relevant to those beneficiaries. This tool is designed to be applied in the early scoping stages of the decision-making process and used in an iterative fashion with input from stakeholders.

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