Abstract
Ecosystems contribute to economic development through the supply of ecosystem services such as food and fresh water. Information on ecosystems and their services is required to support policy making, but this information is not captured in economic statistics. Ecosystem accounting has been developed to integrate ecosystems and ecosystem services into national accounts. Ecosystem accounting includes the compilation of an ecosystem services supply and use account, which reflects actual flows of ecosystem services, and the ecosystem capacity account, which reflects the capacity of ecosystems to sustainably supply ecosystem services. A capacity assessment requires detailed data on ecosystem processes, which are often not available over large scales. In this study, we examined how net primary productivity derived from remote sensing can be used as an indicator to assess changes in the capacity of ecosystems to supply services. We examine the spatial and temporal patterns in this capacity for the Orinoco river basin from 2001 to 2014. Specifically, we analyze the capacity of six types of ecosystems to supply timber, pastures for grazing cattle, oil palm fresh fruit bunches and to sequester carbon. We compared ecosystem capacities with the level of ecosystem service supply to assess a sustainable use of ecosystems. Our study provides insights on how the capacity of ecosystems can be quantified using remote sensing data in the context of ecosystem accounting. Ecosystem capacity indicators indicate ecosystems change and harvesting-regeneration patterns which are important for the design and monitoring of sustainable management regimes for ecosystems.
Highlights
Ecosystems provide a wide variety of ecosystem services essential for human survival, including the supply of food, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Environmental Management (2019) 63:1–15Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EEA) to assess changes in ecosystems and the flow of ecosystem services, accounting for changes in stock and flows consistent with the System of Environmental Economic Accounting CentralFramework (SEEA-CF) model (United Nations et al 2014a; 2015)
Ecosystem accounting was developed as an experimental system towards the integration of environment and economic information into the system of national accounts
Our study provided insights on (i) how the capacity of ecosystems to supply ecosystem services can be assessed and (ii) how remote sensing can be used to support this assessment in large areas
Summary
A clear distinction between capacity and flow is important because the generation of some ecosystem services involves harvest-regeneration patterns and for some ecosystem the generation of ecosystem services can be above its capacity. This is important to assess the overall sustainability of the human activities in such ecosystem. The concept of capacity can be used to assess a sustainable use of ecosystems, as capacity reflects the ability of an ecosystem to sustainably supply a service under current ecosystem condition and uses at the highest yield or use level (Hein et al 2016; United Nations et al 2017). By quantifying the capacity of an ecosystem to supply ecosystem services, the maximum amount of ecosystem services that can be supplied in a sustainable way is defined
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