Modeling present and future ecosystem services and environmental justice within an urban-coastal watershed

Abstract

Globally, urban-coastal areas are expected to experience substantial landscape shifts as a result of climate change induced sea level rise. Such changes will impact valuable ecosystem services. We employed sea level rise projections and land cover change mapping to develop a model which quantified present-day carbon sequestration, aboveground carbon storage, and belowground carbon storage ecosystem services and predicted the impact of sea level rise and accretion through 2100 on future ecosystem services in the urban-coastal Jamaica Bay, New York (USA) watershed. Our model predicted that future carbon sequestration, aboveground carbon storage, and belowground carbon storage potential in our watershed will be significantly impacted in wetlands and natural coastal-fringe habitat and have losses up to 0.16%, 15%, and 51%, respectively. We paired our present-day ecosystem services model results with data on socio-economic need (access to open space and poverty level of each census tract in the watershed) and used multivariate clustering analysis to identify clusters in which planning and restoration may help to address issues of ecological conservation and environmental justice. Our work addresses the need for better understanding of urban-coastal ecosystem service flows and the potential impact of future landscape change on these services. Our results provide support to increase coastal resilience through informed design, planning, and management of these ecologically and socially significant landscapes.