Ecosystem Services最新文献

Auction theory has made major contributions to overcoming allocation problems involving asymmetric information and common-pool resources, leading to multiple Nobel Prizes and serving as a foundation for multi-billion-dollar markets. Despite evidence that related mechanisms could enhance the performance of payments for ecosystem services (PES), adoption has been sporadic and inconsistent. One possibility is that the relevant peer reviewed literature has low visibility or consensus design elements are not sufficiently accessible to interested experts. To overcome this barrier, we adopt a straightforward approach: we asked the PES auction subfield to describe itself. In collaboration with an expert panel (n = 32) whose affiliations span more than two dozen universities and research bodies across three continents—including top-ranked economists, ecosystem services theorists, and practitioners with experience designing and implementing PES programs with and without auctions—we synthesize a birds-eye view of ecosystem services auctions for an interdisciplinary audience. Through an iterative, mixed-method Delphi consultation, we identify broad consensus about fundamental elements of theory and practice, including what functions auctions tend to perform well, common challenges, and key factors influencing their performance. By selecting topics that panelists appeared to disagree about for further discussion, we also highlight open questions and potential research frontiers. We conclude with a reflection on using the Delphi method to foster exchange between time-constrained experts.

Accounting for the tradeoffs and importance urban, disadvantaged communities place on ecosystem services has implications for the management of nearby forests. Although stated preference valuation approaches are often used, they are based on an individual’s perspective and rarely account for collective or societal values. Thus, alternative methods are needed to capture this dichotomy from urban communities who may not even be aware of these benefits to themselves or society at-large. We explored individual and collective importance of, and tradeoffs for, ecosystem services (ES) and ecosystem disservices (ED) by urban residents living near montane forests in greater Los Angeles, California, USA. Using an online panel survey, individual (I-rationality) versus collective (We-rationality) scenarios, best-worst scaling (BWS) choice experiments, and latent class analyses, we ranked the importance and tradeoffs among ES-ED attributes to nearby residents based on the frequency of visits to montane forests as well as Hispanic ethnicity. Results show statistically significant tradeoffs and differences in importance rankings between individual versus collective valuation scenarios. Under the individual valuation scenario, non-Hispanics highly ranked the high forest density indicator, which has implications for wildfire EDs to montane forests and communities. Gender and income were more influential sociodemographic factors affecting importance for water and recreation-related ES than was education. Our BWS and econometric methods, attributes, and importance rankings can facilitate participatory processes with diverse urban communities and designing more effective policies and management guidelines. This approach can also more inclusively, and equitably, account for the tradeoffs and values that nearby urban communities place on ES/ED from Wildland-Urban Interface forests.

World dairy production is growing rapidly having increased by 339 million tons over the last twenty years. However, it remains unclear how anthropic activities in the milk sector can impact the Ecosystem Services (ES) supply to society. The aim of this study was to propose and determine the Net Environmental Performance (NEP) of different milk production systems. For this purpose, a case study on a confined compost barn farm, located in southeastern Brazil was selected as reference scenario and compared with three other systems. The mapping of ES benefits was carried out using the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services, while environmental impacts were calculated using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The LCA results and ecosystem benefits were combined and converted into monetary units to calculate the NEP per 1 kg of milk. The results indicated that semi-confined systems had the worst environmental performance (90 % more impacts) compared to the compost barn milk system. On the other hand, confined systems generate few ES benefits, but their environmental impacts were lower for most LCA impact categories (up to 87 % minimized impacts) compared to semi-confined systems. Finally, we concluded the confined systems in SP and PR showed the best NEP (1.07 and 1.48) aiming for both environmental impacts and ES benefits to fit the win–win situation.

Upland regions in the UK are increasingly under consideration as potential areas for the creation of woodlands. This is driven by a combination of factors, including the aims of UK forestry policy to increase woodland cover, changes in current upland land-use and management, agri-environment schemes in national and international policy and an increasing public awareness of the ecosystem service benefits landscapes can deliver for society. Creating new woodlands in upland areas is challenging, partly due to concerns of potential impacts from a change in land use and stakeholder interests. This study considers a 250 km² Cumbrian (England) upland landscape dominated by sheep grazing and, using an established ecosystem service assessment tool (TESSA), estimates the provision of ecosystem services under plausible alternative woodland creation scenarios. The assessment focuses on key ecosystem goods and services, which are identified by stakeholders to be of high importance to the study area, and the potential changes to those under the scenarios. The results indicate that, under lower woodland percentage scenarios (10 %), minor benefits are expected. However, a more complex outcome would be expected from the higher percentage woodland scenarios (75 %) with the woodland cover of 50 % identified as providing the highest overall benefit to society.

Economic development often impacts on ecosystem services. Previous studies have raised public and political awareness of the costs associated with such impacts and the benefits of ecosystem services. In cases where empirical information on the value of ecosystem services is lacking, benefit transfer (BT) approaches that use value estimates from a previously studied site to estimate the economic values of a new target area have been established. One of the most popular BT approaches is unit value transfer, where constant ecosystem service value coefficients are used to assess a given land-use/land-cover (LULC) change. In several case studies assessing LULC changes, such unit value transfers with constant value coefficients are biased when nonmarginal changes are involved. Theoretical considerations suggest that large changes in land allocation should alter the opportunity costs of gaining or losing natural capital because the marginal costs of additional losses increase as some LULC types become scarcer (e.g. natural ecosystems). In contrast, marginal benefits shrink as other LULC types become more abundant (e.g. agricultural replacement systems).

Here, we propose an improved method for assessing larger scale (i.e., at national levels and beyond) LULC changes using endogenous value coefficients that account for the size of the land cover allocated to each LULC type and derive an equation for calculating these coefficients. The extent to which the value coefficient changes with variations in the land cover area depends on the land-cover elasticity of the value coefficient. Using a hypothetical numerical example of an area of tropical forest converted into grassland, we show that the bias caused by neglecting this land-cover elasticity can be considerable. We also demonstrate how the elasticity needed to correct the value coefficient can be estimated empirically. Finally, we suggest some modifications for future studies assessing large LULC changes.

Floodplains provide a wide range of interdependent ecosystem services (ES) that more or less correlate with water quality. Any change to one component of the ecosystem can have a ripple effect on parts of or on the whole system. We tested a methodology that integrates collaborative learning and creation processes with stakeholders aimed at (1) identifying causal relationships between water quality-related ecosystem services of floodplains themselves and between ES and the pressures they encounter by using fuzzy cognitive mapping, and (2) visualizing “what-if” scenarios of the potential impact of changing pressures on selected ES, as the authors’ contribution to extending the methodology. The approach is tested on the case study of the Koviljsko-petrovaradinski rit floodplain in Serbia. Ten ES and five pressures selected as most important by stakeholders were used to create the sophisticated fuzzy cognitive model and assess the influence of pressures’ increase or decrease on given ES. Using the model, ideal (all pressures minimized) and optimal (stakeholders defined realistic level of reduction of pressures) scenarios were analyzed and mapped for the ‘Habitat provisioning’ service. The impact of maximization of each particular pressure on ES is assessed as well. The results indicate that ‘Wastewater‘ has the greatest negative influence on all ES (particularly on ‘Plant biomass grassland’); it is followed by ‘Land take’ and ‘Drought events’. If wastewater pressure is reduced to the minimum, the results obtained are similar to the optimal scenario. The proposed approach facilitates a comprehensive assessment of the floodplain’s potential to provide ES under different pressures and enhances stakeholders’ integrated understanding of the complex floodplain ecosystem and its services. This, in turn, together with the visualization of the different scenarios, enables more effective decision-making and management strategies for floodplains.

Ecosystem services (ES) are the ecosystem contribution to human well-being: they bridge ecosystems with socio-economic systems, in terms of both impacts and dependencies. So far, most of the research on ES focused on the services delivered “here and now”, i.e. where spatial location of ecosystem providers and human users can be defined and when the delivery of the needed services can be allocated to the current generations. However, especially when considering the medium- and long-term effects of climate change adaptation, there is the need to start projecting the scope of the services beyond national boundaries and to the future generations. Although formally listed and acknowledged, many ES currently miss applications able to support appropriate biophysical assessment and valuation. In this respect, it is time to start considering ES that go beyond the “here” because they serve the global society, and beyond the “now” because they consider long terms impacts. This article identifies possible streams of these “not-here, not-now” ES that requires developing applications, as it is already happening for many other ES. Such ES, in fact, contribute to identify long-term “critical ecological asset”, whose assessment can provide important environmental metrics for economic and financial analyses.

Including human dimensions in conservation practice is increasingly recognized as being essential for creating sustainable and equitable solutions to the current biodiversity crisis. However, including ecosystem services in conservation planning is challenging because services can be intangible and difficult to map, and incorporating equitable access to the resulting benefits of ecosystem services has hardly been considered. Ecological Infrastructure (EI) is a promising framework for integrating ecosystem services into systematic conservation planning (SCP), yet its application remains to be tested. We aimed to quantify the effects of including EI, with and without equitable access, in a biodiversity-based SCP, where EI is the spatial representation of ecosystem services. We took an experimental, scenario-planning approach, running five scenarios in Marxan software with different combinations of input features: biodiversity (n = 135 features), EI (n = 6) and EI with equitable access (hereafter EI*, n = 84) for the South African coastal zone. The resulting conservation networks were compared using multivariate statistics, considering: the proportion of feature targets met; coverage of core areas (areas with 100 % selection frequency for biodiversity features, EI, and EI*); conservation network size and cost; and spatial configuration. Including biodiversity and equitable access drove the dissimilarity among scenarios, and only when all input features were included, were all core areas well covered and all feature targets met. Therefore, biodiversity features were not an adequate surrogate for EI or EI*, and including ecosystem services (via EI*) in SCP is necessary to ensure equitable access to benefits. However, including EI increased the mean size (7.0 % more planning units) and cost (by 9.1 %) of conservation networks. Despite this, the social and economic benefits of investing in EI (e.g., securing dunes for coastal protection) likely outweigh these costs, especially in the longer term.

Climate change is considered a major driver for environmental changes and impacts on human well-being. Understanding the relationships between climatic changes and ecosystem services (ES) is therefore crucial to develop effective adaption and mitigation measures. However, studies that comprehensively assess climate change impacts on ES, providing also spatially explicit information, are greatly lacking. To address this gap, this study aims at assessing and mapping potential impacts on multiple ES in Central Europe, using the example of Austria. Our analysis steps included (1) mapping provisioning, regulating, and cultural ES (n = 19) using a land use/cover-based approach, (2) deriving potential impacts on indicators (n = 58), used to assess ES, through a literature analysis, (3) mapping potential impacts on ES in qualitative terms, and (4) analysing spatial patterns across Austria. Our results indicate that, in particular, water-related ES and cultural ES will decline, while some provisioning and regulating ES will improve. The spatial analysis revealed that regions located in the south-eastern parts of Austria will be potentially affected the most by climate change impacts, while less ES will decline in western mountain regions. Our findings contribute to the knowledge base for decision-making at different governance levels, supporting the development of policies and management strategies at the national and international level, as well as fostering communication with stakeholders and the elaboration of targeted management plans at the local and regional level. Our proposed mapping approach is easily transferable to other regions, but future research should address current limitations related to uncertainties in climate projections, the clear distinction of climate-induced impacts, and the role of climate-related hazards.

Flood mitigation service provides crucial information for reducing flood disasters and assessing ecosystem capacities by quantifying how much damage is reduced and how many benefiting areas are protected during flood events. However, there remains a gap in the full-process quantification, which results in less precise simulation outcomes. In this study, we introduce a novel methodology to accurately quantify the flood mitigation service of ecosystems by coupling hydrological and hydrodynamic models. We utilized the Hydrological Simulation Program-Fortran (HSPF) model to simulate peak flow and flood volume and then used these data as inputs for the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code (EFDC) hydrodynamic model to simulate the spatial extent and depth of flood inundation. The contribution and capacity of the ecosystem are reflected through the reduction in peak flow, flood volume, and inundation areas. We used the Nandu Basin flood event in October 2010 as a case study to illustrate our approach, comparing our assessment results with those simulated by the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model and the Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND) model. The results demonstrate that coupling the HSPF model (R² = 0.93) with the EFDC model (overlap ratio = 83.71 %) allows for precise quantification of flood mitigation service. The process-based hydrological and hydrodynamic models show a high correlation with the simpler and faster InVEST and HAND model simulations, with the full-process models reducing relative errors by 7.66 % and 5.25 % respectively. This study offers a promising approach for accurately and comprehensively assessing flood mitigation ecosystem service and provides a basis for model selection.