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The US EPA’s Ecosystem Services Research Program (ESRP) is conducting transdisciplinary research to develop tools to enable decision-makers at all levels of governance to proactively conserve ecosystem services. One of these tools is a National Atlas of Ecosystem Services which ...

Solving the environmental problems that we are facing today requires holistic approaches to analysis and decision making that include social and economic aspects. The concept of ecosystem services, defined as the benefits people obtain from ecosystems, is one potential tool to p...

The task of estimating ecosystem service production and delivery deserves special attention. Assessment tools that incorporate both supply and delivery of ecosystem services are needed to better understand how ecosystem services production becomes realized benefits. Here, we de...

Over the last decade, research and policy institutions across the globe have shown a dramatic increase in attention to the benefits that human society receives from ecosystems. In the U.S., a broad range of Federal resource management and environmental agencies are conducting r...

Slide Presentation

&ldquo;Ecosystem services&rdquo; are the benefits ecosystems provide to people. These benefits include providing food, clean air, clean water, recreation, and many other services that provide explicit or intrinsic values to people and communities. Investments in Chesapeake Bay re...

In spite of their perceived value, the widespread implementation of ecosystem services assessments has been limited because of perceptions of being too technical, too expensive, or requiring special expertise. For example, federal estuary management programs have widely used ecos...

Ecosystem services, i.e., &quot;services provided to humans from natural systems,&quot; have become a key issue of this century in resource management, conservation planning, human well-being, and environmental decision analysis. Mapping and quantifying ecosystem services have be...

There are a multitude of actual or envisioned, complete or incomplete, ecosystem service classification systems being proposed to support Green Accounting. Green Accounting is generally thought to be the formal accounting attempt to factor environmental production into National ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently established the Ecosystem Services Research Program to help formulate methods and models for conducting comprehensive risk assessments that quantify how multiple ecosystem services interact and respond in concert to environmental ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently established the Ecosystem Services Research Program to help formulate methods and models for conducting comprehensive risk assessments that quantify how multiple ecosystem services interact and respond in concert to environmental ...

Quantifying ecosystem goods and services can help evaluate policies aimed at protecting present and future generations from losing ecosystem benefits. Explicating and quantifying the relationships among risk factors, ecological structure and function, and delivery of ecosystem go...

Forecasting and communicating the potential outcomes of decision options requires support tools that aid in evaluating alternative scenarios in a user-friendly context and that highlight variables relevant to the decision options and valuable stakeholders. Envision is a GIS-base...

Many of the Midwestern US &ldquo;Rust Belt&rdquo; cities contain Areas of Concern (AOC) where extensive efforts to remediate aquatic sediments, restore riparian habitat and ecosystem services, and realize community revitalization are unfolding. USEPA has coined the term &ldquo;Re...

Many of the Midwestern US &ldquo;Rust Belt&rdquo; cities contain Areas of Concern (AOC) where extensive efforts to remediate aquatic sediments, restore riparian habitat and ecosystem services, and realize community revitalization are unfolding. USEPA has coined the term &ldquo;Re...

Ecosystem services (ESs) represent an ecosystem’s capacity for satisfying essential human needs, directly or indirectly, above that required to maintain ecosystem integrity (structure, function and processes). The spatial characterization and mapping of ESs is an essential first ...

In coastal communities, stresses derived from landuse changes, climate change, and serial over-exploitation can have major effects on coral reefs, which support multibillion dollar fishing and tourism industries vital to regional economies. A key challenge in evaluating coastal a...

EPA H2O is an open source Geographic Information System (GIS) based demonstration tool, used for assessing Ecosystem Services (ES) at local to regional scales. EPA H2O was developed as a preliminary assessment tool in support of research being conducted in the Tampa Bay, FL USA w...

The ecosystem services concept is being used to frame environmental protection goals that guide management of the risks of chemicals. Ecosystem services link changes in ecological systems to the benefits received by people. The use of ecosystem services in risk assessments and th...

The Ecosystem Services Research Program (ESRP) is a new, multi-year research initiative under development by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The overall goal of the ESRP is to transform the way decision-makers understand and respond to environmental issues, making...

U.S. EPA’s Office of Research and Development has made ecosystem services the new strategic focus for its Ecological Services Research Program (ESRP). Understanding that the protection and enhancement of ecosystem services can help maintain and improve human health, economic vit...

U.S. EPA’s Office of Research and Development has made ecosystem services the new strategic focus for its Ecological Research Program (ERP). Understanding that the protection and enhancement of ecosystem services can help maintain and improve human health, economic vitality, and...

In this article we present EnviroAtlas, a web-based, open access tool that seeks to meet a range of needs by bringing together environmental, economic and demographic data in an ecosystem services framework. Within EnviroAtlas, there are three primary types of geospatial data: r...

Consideration of ecosystem services is important for decisions that have an impact on the environment, including decisions related to managment of contaminated sites. The impacts of these decisions on ecosystem services, however, can be overlooked in favor of the impacts on other...

Ecosystem restoration may require implementing programs or best management practices (BMPs) in areas that are geographically far from the target ecosystem. Stakeholders in these areas may feel disconnected from the target ecosystem or may not have a clear understanding of local b...