Analyzing land-use change scenarios for trade-offs among cultural ecosystem services in the Southern Rocky Mountains

Abstract

Significant increases in outdoor recreation participants are projected over the next 50 years for national forests across the United States, with even larger increases possible for forests located in the Southern Rocky Mountains. Forest managers will be challenged to balance increasing demand for outdoor recreation with other ecosystem services. Future management needs could be better anticipated with information describing how and where stakeholders value these forests’ cultural ecosystem services, as well as how management might impact these values. We analyzed land-use change scenarios to quantify changes in aesthetic and recreational ecosystem service values and assessed trade-offs between these values relative to forest stakeholder groups defined by their attitudes regarding motorized recreation. We adapted the GIS tool, Social Values for Ecosystem Services (SolVES), for scenario analysis and applied it to two national forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains to examine impacts of road-network expansion on stakeholder values. Our approach allowed us to quantify changes in the spatial distribution and intensity of aesthetic and recreation values. Trade-off assessments between the two values indicated that areas of conflicting value changes were limited, even when accounting for different user groups. However, this approach could be an important means of conflict resolution for multi-use management.