Abstract
Ecological systems are made up of complex and often unknown interactions and feedbacks. Uncovering these interactions and feedbacks among species, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services is challenging, costly, and time-consuming. Here, we ask: for which ecosystem features does resolving the uncertainty about the feedbacks from ecosystem function to species improve management outcomes? We develop a dynamic value of information analysis for risk-neutral and risk-prone managers on motif ecosystems and explore the influence of five ecological features. We find that learning the feedbacks from ecosystem function to species does not improve management outcomes for maximising biodiversity, yet learning which species benefit from an ecosystem function improves management outcomes for ecosystem services by up to 25% for risk-neutral managers and 231% for risk-prone managers. Our general approach provides useful guidance for managers and researchers on when learning feedbacks from ecosystem function to species can improve management outcomes for multiple conservation objectives.
Highlights
Ecological systems are made up of complex and often unknown interactions and feedbacks
Ecosystem functions contribute to the production of ecosystem services and support the survival of species in an ecosystem[6,7]
We combine value of information analysis—an approach for quantifying how much management outcomes could be improved if a decision-maker could resolve uncertainties[35], and stochastic dynamic programming—an optimisation approach that has been widely applied on sequential decision-making problems[36,37,38]
Summary
Ecological systems are made up of complex and often unknown interactions and feedbacks. Decreased pollination from local pollinator extirpations could affect crop production and pollinator-dependent native plants[15,16] Learning about these feedback links from ecosystem function to species could be important to inform decisions on species management priority to maximise biodiversity or ecosystem services. To evaluate the feedbacks with ecosystem services we connect each motif with one major function that contributes to a key ecosystem service in the system (Fig. 1 and Methods) Using this model we investigate how different ecological features, such as the motif, the feedback strength and the trophic level of the species providing the ecosystem function (Fig. 1), drive the management benefit of this information. To illustrate the value of our work to real-world situations, we apply our approach to an empirical salt marsh ecosystem in Carpinteria Salt Marsh Reserve, CA, USA from Hechinger et al.[46] and find consistent results with our theoretical findings
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