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The final ecosystem goods and services Voltron: the power of tools together
Citation:
Sharpe, L., M. Harwell, C. Phifer, G. Gardner, AND Tamara Newcomer Johnson. The final ecosystem goods and services Voltron: the power of tools together. FRONTIERS IN ECOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT. Ecological Society of America, Ithaca, NY, 11:1-16, (2023). https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2023.1290662
Impact/Purpose:
The concept of final ecosystem goods and services (FEGS) are the aspects of the environment directly enjoyed, used, or consumed by humans. The central feature of FEGS is that ecosystems are viewed through the diverse ways people directly benefit from them. The USEPA has developed classification systems for these services, the latest version is the National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS) Plus. The standardization made available by NESCS Plus allows other tools and databases developed with NESCS Plus categories to interact. This paper builds upon a session at the 2022 ACES conference (https://conference.ifas.ufl.edu/aces/) and provides an overview of USEPA-developed tools useful for implementing ecosystem services analysis. While these tools have been developed separately, they all use categories from NESCS Plus. This consistency allows tool users to smoothly move from one to another and build upon the results from each to answer a variety of questions for decision makers. This paper lays out how these tools can connect, provides examples of how they have been, could be, and will be used as well as previewing future tools that plan to use the same framework.
Description:
Environmental decision-making benefits from considering ecosystem services to ensure that aspects of the environment that people rely upon are fully evaluated. By focusing consideration of ecosystem services on final ecosystem goods and services (FEGS), the aspects of the environment directly enjoyed, used, or consumed by humans, these analyses can be more streamlined and effective. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has developed a set of tools to facilitate this consideration. The central feature of FEGS is that ecosystems are viewed through the diverse ways people directly benefit from them. The National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS) Plus provides a framework for describing and identifying FEGS consistently. The standardization made available by NESCS Plus allows other tools and databases to interact using the NESCS Plus architecture and taxonomy, providing diverse insights for decision makers. Here, we examine the synergy of using the following four tools together: (1) the FEGS Scoping Tool; (2) the FEGS Metrics Report; (3) the EnviroAtlas; and (4) the EcoService Models Library. The FEGS Scoping Tool helps users determine what ecosystem services are relevant to a decision by harnessing FEGS understanding to enable communities to identify the relative importance of beneficiaries relevant to a decision and biophysical aspects of the environment of direct relevance to those beneficiaries. The FEGS Metrics Report can guide which metrics to monitor or model to represent those priority services. The EnviroAtlas, a powerful tool containing geospatial data and other resources related to ecosystem services, chemical and non-chemical stressors, and human health, and the EcoService Models Library, a database of ecosystem models, are two tools that support users in mapping and modeling endpoints relevant to priority services. While each of these tools is valuable on its own, together, they provide a powerful approach to easily incorporate and operationalize ecosystem services efforts into different parts of decision-making processes across different types of decisions. We illustrate how these integrated tools can be used together with a hypothetical example of a complex environmental management case study and the combined benefit of using the FEGS tools together.
