Abstract
The importance of ecosystems for supporting human well-being is increasingly recognized by both the conservation and development sectors. Our ability to conserve ecosystems that people rely on is often limited by a lack of spatially explicit data on the location and distribution of ecosystem services (ES), the benefits provided by nature to people. Thus there is a need to map ES to guide conservation investments, to ensure these co-benefits are maintained. To target conservation investments most effectively, ES assessments must be rigorous enough to support conservation planning, rapid enough to respond to decision-making timelines, and often must rely on existing data. We developed a framework for rapid spatial assessment of ES that relies on expert and stakeholder consultation, available data, and spatial analyses in order to rapidly identify sites providing multiple benefits. We applied the framework in Madagascar, a country with globally significant biodiversity and a high level of human dependence on ecosystems. Our objective was to identify the ES co-benefits of biodiversity priority areas in order to guide the investment strategy of a global conservation fund. We assessed key provisioning (fisheries, hunting and non-timber forest products, and water for domestic use, agriculture, and hydropower), regulating (climate mitigation, flood risk reduction and coastal protection), and cultural (nature tourism) ES. We also conducted multi-criteria analyses to identify sites providing multiple benefits. While our approach has limitations, including the reliance on proximity-based indicators for several ES, the results were useful for targeting conservation investments by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF). Because our approach relies on available data, standardized methods for linking ES provision to ES use, and expert validation, it has the potential to quickly guide conservation planning and investment decisions in other data-poor regions.
Highlights
In recent decades, the conservation movement has increasingly focused on conserving ecosystems for their biodiversity values, and for their role in providing benefits to people, known as ecosystem services (ES) [1]
Our approach consists of seven steps (Fig 1), beginning with identifying the key ES that are relevant in a given context; defining criteria for assessing the importance of sites for ES; collecting available spatial data, conducting spatial analyses to map the importance of ES provided by sites; summarizing the results in a set of easy-to-understand maps and tables; reviewing and refining the results with experts and stakeholders; and making recommendations for site prioritization to guide conservation investments
Our analysis relied on a network of in-country experts as well as a complementary process led by Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) to identify Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) using biological criteria and stakeholder consultation; the time and resources required for the KBA identification was not included in the above totals
Summary
The conservation movement has increasingly focused on conserving ecosystems for their biodiversity values, and for their role in providing benefits to people, known as ecosystem services (ES) [1]. Existing tools have varying requirements in terms of input data, time to conduct the assessment, and the level of specialized expertise required. Using these and other methods, ES assessments have been conducted at scales ranging from global [15] to national [16] and sub-national [17]. Information on a broader array of provisioning, regulating, and cultural services, at a scale relevant for national-scale planning, is lacking in many countries
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