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The Massachusetts Bays National Estuary Partnership (Mass Bays NEP) has recently worked to update their comprehensive management plan to include restoration targets for salt marsh, seagrass, and tidal flats. A key question in target setting is asking not only &ldquo;what kind of ...

The quantification or estimation of the economic and non-economic values of ecosystem services can be done from a number of distinct approaches. For example, practitioners may use ecosystem services production function models (ESPFMs) for a particular location, or alternatively, ...

Policies to protect coastal resources will be more effective when they account for the social and economic concerns of stakeholders in the coastal zone and watershed, and are responsive to potential tradeoffs between benefits offered by both land and sea. We focus on the Gu&aacu...

The USGS is developing a binational decision support tool to understand the exchange of ecosystem services in the Santa Cruz Watershed located on the border between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. Ecosystem services are life-sustaining benefits human societies receive from the enviro...

The nation’s ecosystems provide a vast array of services to humans from clean and abundant water to recreational opportunities. The benefits of nature or “ecosystem services” are often taken for granted and not considered in environmental decision-making. In some cases, decis...

Understanding the ways in which ecosystems provide flows of “services” to humans is critical for decision making in many contexts; however, relationships between natural and human systems are complex. A well-defined framework for classifying ecosystem services is essential for sy...

Spatially-explicit ecosystem service valuation (ESV) allows for the identification of the location and magnitude of services provided by natural ecosystems along with an economic measure of their value based upon benefit transfer. While this provides an important function in term...

The consideration of ecosystem services in local decision making is greatly aided by the development of a formal decisional framework. The concept of&nbsp;Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS)&nbsp;explicitly connects ecosystem services to people and this connection greatly a...

Numerous and inconsistent lists of wetland ecosystem services exist because services are identified using ambiguous definitions or categorization schemes based around divergent or ambiguous objectives. A consistent and scientific approach would provide clarity and provide greater...

The concept of Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) explicitly connects ecosystem services to the people that benefit from them. This report presents a number of practical strategies for incorporating FEGS, and more broadly ecosystem services, into the decision-making proces...

Landuse and climate change have affected biological systems in many parts of the world, and are projected to further adversely affect associated ecosystem goods and services, including provisioning of clean air, clean water, food, and biodiversity. Such adverse effects on ecosyst...

The Tampa Bay Ecosystem Services Demonstration Project (TBESDP) is a component of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Ecosystem Services Research Program. The principal objectives of TBESDP are (1) to quantify the ecosystem services of the Tampa Bay watershed, (2) to deter...

Changing patterns of land use, temperature, and precipitation are expected to impact ecosystem services, including water quality and quantity, buffering of extreme events, soil quality, and biodiversity. Scenario analyses that link such impacts on ecosystem services to human well...

In the United States, a broad range of federal resource management and environmental agencies are conducting research related to ecosystem services, and government agencies at all levels are increasingly interested in measuring the outcomes of proposed decision and policy options...

In the United States, a broad range of federal entities are conducting research related to ecosystem services, and government agencies at all levels are increasingly interested in measuring the outcomes of proposed policy options in terms of ecosystem service benefits. However, ...

Coral reefs have been declining during the last four decades as a result of both local and global anthropogenic stresses. Numerous research efforts to elucidate the nature, causes, magnitude, and potential remedies for the decline have led to the widely held belief that the recov...

One potential way to improve progress toward Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement goals is to demonstrate how Bay restoration and conservation related actions may align with the priorities of local communities upstream in the watersheds where they would be implemented. This project...

Ecosystem services provide metrics for quantifying the benefits of nature to humans as well as for measuring the consequences of human actions. For example, how much carbon is sequestered from a wetland mitigation project? How much carbon is released from a wildfire? Communicatin...

The Ecosystem Services Research Program (ESRP) is a new, multi-year research initiative under development by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As one of its components, ESRP has chosen to focus on reactive Nitrogen (Nr) for stressor-specific ecosystem research through a...

This product provides an integrated assessment framework linked to a decision support system (DSS) that incorporates the ecological integrity (EI) principles and goals described in detail in the US EPA&rsquo;s Office of Water&rsquo;s Healthy Watersheds Program (HWP), with Ecosyst...

Under the U.S. Clean Water Act, States and Territories are to establish water quality criteria to protect designated uses, such as fishable or swimmable water resources. However, establishment of chemical and physical thresholds does not necessarily ensure protection of the biot...

Approaches are needed by resource managers to quantify the levels of ecological condition needed to ensure protection and facilitate restoration of critical ecosystem functions and services associated with desired beneficial uses for coastal communities and visitors. In an effort...

In this chapter of the Handbook on Ecosystem Services, we first explore distinctions between nature&rsquo;s benefits and human beneficiaries of nature, and how seemingly slight differences in the definition of ecosystem services can lead to vastly different outcomes. We adopt a ...

The dynamics of any given environmental decision-making context are complicated, including how to consider social-ecological systems connections. Decision support tools designed with a user in mind make it simpler and more natural to integrate science into the decision-making pro...

Characterization of ecosystem services can be a valuable element of Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) in identifying meaningful measures of ecosystem change, understanding the natural resource gains or losses associated with changing ecosystem conditions, and communicating those b...