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Assessing Ecosystem Services Supply for Restoration
Citation:
Russell, M., J. Bousquin, R. Fulford, AND L. Sharpe. Assessing Ecosystem Services Supply for Restoration. National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration, New Orleans, LA, August 26 - 30, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Present a demonstration of our ecosystem services supply assessment tool to a restoration focused community of practice in order to promote our various tools to users
Description:
One of the challenges for current restoration efforts is to adequately evaluate and communicate the values of restoration to the public. An ecosystem services approach helps translate environmental changes into human benefits by putting restoration into relatable value terminology. This helps the public understand the value of restoration efforts to their overall wellbeing, relative to the values for alternative land uses. Here we demonstrate a simple to use, publically available ecosystem services assessment tool developed by the US EPA Office of Research and Development in open source QGIS. Several types of restoration alternatives along the Gulf of Mexico Coastline are compared to baseline conditions for ecosystem functions such as excess nitrogen removal, storm water retention, carbon burial, and atmospheric pollution removal. These processes benefit humans by maintaining downstream water quality, mitigating floods, helping to mitigate emissions effects, and by reducing respiratory health care costs. The tool translates benefits into monetary units using common valuation techniques such as marginal replacement, social, and health care costs with default and adjustable valuation coefficients. Users can define new scenarios by substituting land use/cover types and/or changing transportation networks, which influence travel times for accessing greenspaces for recreational activities, for an area of interest. The basic user interface allows users to visually explore a database for an area via an interactive map and to generate reports for the specific location of interest summarizing the extent of ecological features of interest and the monetary value of the four beneficial ecosystem functions noted above. The advanced user interface setting allows the user to define land use and transportation network change scenarios and compare ecosystem service values and transportation times side by side in a report. The ecosystem services supply valuation approaches in our tool complement our other rapid assessment approaches that provide non-monetary benefit indicator metrics based on human demand and access, to compare benefits of restoring different sites.