Ecosystem Services Classification System Research Articles

Identifying priority ecosystem services in tidal wetland restoration

Classification systems can be an important tool for identifying and quantifying the importance of relationships, assessing spatial patterns in a standardized way, and forecasting alternative decision scenarios to characterize the potential benefits (e.g., ecosystem services) from ecosystem restoration that improve human health and well-being. We present a top-down approach that systematically leverages ecosystem services classification systems to identify potential services relevant for ecosystem restoration decisions. We demonstrate this approach using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Ecosystem Service Classification System Plus (NESCS Plus) to identify those ecosystem services that are relevant to restoration of tidal wetlands. We selected tidal wetland management documents from federal agencies, state agencies, wetland conservation organizations, and land stewards across three regions of the continental United States (northern Gulf of Mexico, Mid-Atlantic, and Pacific Northwest) to examine regional and organizational differences in identified potential benefits of tidal wetland restoration activities and the potential user groups who may benefit. We used an automated document analysis to quantify the frequencies at which different wetland types were mentioned in the management documents along with their associated beneficiary groups and the ecological end products (EEPs) those beneficiaries care about, as defined by NESCS Plus. Results showed that a top combination across all three regions, all four organizations, and all four tidal wetland types was the EEP naturalness paired with the beneficiary people who care (existence). Overall, the Mid-Atlantic region and the land steward organizations mentioned ecosystem services more than the others, and EEPs were mentioned in combination with tidal wetlands as a high-level, more general category than the other more specific tidal wetland types. Certain regional and organizations differences were statistically significant. Those results may be useful in identifying ecosystem services-related goals for tidal wetland restoration. This approach for identifying and comparing ecosystem service priorities is broadly transferrable to other ecosystems or decision-making contexts.

Groundwater Ecosystem Services: Redefining and Operationalizing the Concept

In the last decade, the publication of research studies in the field of groundwater ecosystem services and their classification has increased dramatically. Several academic and other institutions have developed ecosystem service classification systems for use in environmental policy research. However, the existing classification systems need to be optimized in the following areas: (a) the weak correlation between concepts and the definitions assigned, which creates double counting in economic valuation, (b) the absence of correlation of the concept of use value with the ecosystem service, (c) the non-categorization of final and intermediate services, and (d) the overlapping of wetland, soil, and groundwater regulating ecosystem services. Our research aims, through the results of a literature analysis and the synthesis of the results of an expert consultation process, to develop a unified categorization system for groundwater ecosystem services. In the context of the conceptualization of groundwater ecosystem services, this research implemented an expert judging elicitation process where subject discussions and targeted interviews were performed, combined with a literature review analysis. Through the completion of a specific questionnaire and expert interviews, a new groundwater ecosystem services classification system, namely GROUNDWES, was established.

The final ecosystem goods and services Voltron: the power of tools together.

Environmental decision-making benefits from considering ecosystem services to ensure that aspects of the environment that people rely upon are fully evaluated. By focusing consideration of ecosystem services on final ecosystem goods and services (FEGS), the aspects of the environment directly enjoyed, used, or consumed by humans, these analyses can be more streamlined and effective. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has developed a set of tools to facilitate this consideration. The central feature of FEGS is that ecosystems are viewed through the diverse ways people directly benefit from them. The National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS) Plus provides a framework for describing and identifying FEGS consistently. The standardization made available by NESCS Plus allows other tools and databases to interact using the NESCS Plus architecture and taxonomy, providing diverse insights for decision makers. Here, we examine the synergy of using the following four tools together: (1) the FEGS Scoping Tool; (2) the FEGS Metrics Report; (3) the EnviroAtlas; and (4) the EcoService Models Library. The FEGS Scoping Tool helps users determine what ecosystem services are relevant to a decision by harnessing FEGS understanding to enable communities to identify the relative importance of beneficiaries relevant to a decision and biophysical aspects of the environment of direct relevance to those beneficiaries. The FEGS Metrics Report can guide which metrics to monitor or model to represent those priority services. The EnviroAtlas, a powerful tool containing geospatial data and other resources related to ecosystem services, chemical and non-chemical stressors, and human health, and the EcoService Models Library, a database of ecosystem models, are two tools that support users in mapping and modeling endpoints relevant to priority services. While each of these tools is valuable on its own, together, they provide a powerful approach to easily incorporate and operationalize ecosystem services efforts into different parts of decision-making processes across different types of decisions. We illustrate how these integrated tools can be used together with a hypothetical example of a complex environmental management case study and the combined benefit of using the FEGS tools together.

The intersection of economic demand for ecosystem services and public policy: A watershed case study exploring implications for social-ecological resilience

Regional economies depend, to varying degrees, on water-based ecosystem services. As growing populations and other pressures increasingly stress underlying ecosystems, it is imperative that society better understand the linkages between economic and ecological systems, and how policy seeks to mediate competing interests. However, detailed analysis is often beyond the reach of resource-constrained local governments. Two general principles are proposed for conceptualizing linkages between ecological and economic systems. These principles are used to reformulate an existing ecosystem services classification system, which is then applied to the Mississippi Valley watershed in Ontario, Canada, to identify areas of high economic demand for water-based ecosystem services. Incorporating upstream–downstream linkages and climate change considerations, the extant policy framework is assessed for its ability to manage these systems-based considerations, informing a discussion of how policy, property rights, and other system attributes could combine to drawdown ecological resources and undermine the opportunity for others to access needed ecosystem services. This has the potential to create feedback and exacerbate resilience challenges or, with improved understanding of policy linkages, inform countermeasures to improve ecosystem management.

Testing ecosystem accounting in the United States: A case study for the Southeast

Ecosystem accounts, as formalized by the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Experimental Ecosystem Accounts (SEEA EEA), have been compiled in a number of countries, yet there have been few attempts to develop them for the U.S. We explore the potential for U.S. ecosystem accounting by compiling ecosystem extent, condition, and ecosystem services supply and use accounts for a 10-state region in the Southeast. The pilot accounts address air quality, water quality, biodiversity, carbon storage, recreation, and pollination for selected years from 2001 to 2015. Results illustrate how information from ecosystem accounts can contribute to policy and decision making. Using an example from Atlanta, we also show how ecosystem accounts can be considered alongside other SEEA accounts to give a more complete picture of a local area’s environmental-economic trends. The process by which we determined where to place metrics within the accounting framework, which was strongly informed by the National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS), can provide guidance for future ecosystem accounts in the U.S. and other countries. Finally, we identify knowledge gaps that limit the inclusion of certain ecosystem services in the accounts and suggest future research that can close these gaps and improve future U.S. ecosystem accounts.

The theoretical frameworks behind integrated environmental, ecosystem, and economic accounting systems and their classifications

The integration of ecosystem services and accounting systems can help different stakeholders understand the economic implications of environmental impacts. Any such integration requires clear understanding of how ecosystem services may match and integrate with traditional accounts. The Experimental Ecosystem Accounts (EEA) of the System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA) is developing quickly with applications at different administrative levels. One emerging feature is lack of agreement on conceptual notions and definitions that could reconcile different approaches. Some basic issues can be developed and solved only once a theoretical basis has been established. Since the first step of any application is to identify which ecosystem services to account for, this paper explores whether and to what extent the theoretical frameworks behind ecosystem services classification systems match the theoretical framework behind the SEEA EEA. This attempt first tackles the conceptual framework on the accounting side, then the conceptual framework on the ecosystem services classification side. Combining the two sides, it is possible to visualize matches or mismatches and to infer a few consequences and implications. Ecosystem services classification systems can guide separation of intra-ecosystem processes from final ecosystem services, and help disentangle ecosystem services from benefits, key requirements for integrating accounts.

Designing an Ecosystem Services Ontology within GEOBON

Assessing, mapping and quantifying ecosystem services is a growing priority within local, national and international policy and decision-making processes. That requires robust and scientifically sound data and information on biodiversity, including ecological and socio-economic aspects that interact within the social-ecological systems. Ecosystem services are quantified and mapped across spatio-temporal scales, socio-political contexts and for different policy objectives, which leads to an immense variety of approaches, methods, tools, modelling and mapping outputs. Within the Group on Earth Observation-Biodiversity Observation Network (GEOBON) working group on Ecosystem Services (https://geobon.org/ebvs/ecosystem-services/), we acknowledge the significance of maintaining this diversity, but also the need to bring these different approaches together, to improve data and information sharing across a broad range of scientific fields. Given the high diversity of topics, terms, and classification frameworks that exist, harmonizing everything under one core set of data standards proved to be both a challenge and a questionable option in terms of usability. We therefore work towards developing and proposing an ontological system that can be used for monitoring ecosystem services across space and time. We designed ESOnto, the ecosystem services ontology, which uses the principles of Linked Data (Berners-Lee 2006) to connect the concepts of the ontology, while providing a flexible structure that hosts multiple approaches/definitions and ecosystem services classification systems. ESOnto takes into account the most widely used ecosystem services classification frameworks that exist are all used in ESOnto, since they all address different objectives and approaches. Their core concepts are all included in the ontology and the relationships among them are established allowing the user to navigate among the different classification systems. as well as reRelevant ontologies from both the environmental and social o-economic domains, such as ENVO (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/ontologies/envo) and OBO (www.obofoundry.org) . These are also used to define build the basic concepts that ESOnto covers such as, 'map' or 'habitat'. This use of existing knowledge allows for interoperability among ontological systems, and guarantees a more usable ontology that does not aim to reinvent the wheel. Although the need for setting up data standards for ecosystem services has been expressed among researchers (Palomo et al. 2018, Drakou et al. 2015), this is the first time such an attempt has been made. Within this talk we will present the workflow we followed: we made an overview of existing data standards and ontologies from the fields of biodiversity, ecology and social sciences, which were used to inform the ESOnto; we identified the gaps and proposed a set of data standards for ecosystem services; we developed a set of task-based queries and user-based evaluations to validate those data standards before their final establishment as an ontology. ESOnto is now applied and tested within existing platforms, namely the Bon-in-a-Box (https://boninabox.geobon.org/). The final objective is that ESOnto will be used to facilitate the process of data collection through remote sensing within the GEOBON community.

Ecosystem services classification: A systems ecology perspective of the cascade framework

Ecosystem services research faces several challenges stemming from the plurality of interpretations of classifications and terminologies. In this paper we identify two main challenges with current ecosystem services classification systems: i) the inconsistency across concepts, terminology and definitions, and; ii) the mix up of processes and end-state benefits, or flows and assets. Although different ecosystem service definitions and interpretations can be valuable for enriching the research landscape, it is necessary to address the existing ambiguity to improve comparability among ecosystem-service-based approaches. Using the cascade framework as a reference, and Systems Ecology as a theoretical underpinning, we aim to address the ambiguity across typologies. The cascade framework links ecological processes with elements of human well-being following a pattern similar to a production chain. Systems Ecology is a long-established discipline which provides insight into complex relationships between people and the environment. We present a refreshed conceptualization of ecosystem services which can support ecosystem service assessment techniques and measurement. We combine the notions of biomass, information and interaction from system ecology, with the ecosystem services conceptualization to improve definitions and clarify terminology. We argue that ecosystem services should be defined as the interactions (i.e. processes) of the ecosystem that produce a change in human well-being, while ecosystem components or goods, i.e. countable as biomass units, are only proxies in the assessment of such changes. Furthermore, Systems Ecology can support a re-interpretation of the ecosystem services conceptualization and related applied research, where more emphasis is needed on the underpinning complexity of the ecological system.

Abiotic flows should be inherent part of ecosystem services classification

Although ecosystems comprise both biotic and abiotic structures and processes, the role of abiotic output receives less attention and is addressed inconsistently in ecosystem services (ES) classification systems. The authors explore the nature and position of abiotic ecosystem output from: 1) a theoretical perspective on ecosystems, ecosystems services and natural capital; 2) a practical perspective on applying the ES concept in environmental policy, spatial planning and ecosystem management. From a theoretical point of view, excluding abiotic flows in ES frameworks such as CICES is inconsistent with the principles of the ES concept. Consequently, abiotic flows with (high) societal relevance may in practice be neglected or selectively addressed; many of them are related to sediment and the subsurface part of ecosystems. This impedes the integration strength of the ES concept. Given the large contributions to the economy and the societal costs of non-sustainable use of abiotic flows, it also impedes holistic, consistent and transparent information provision to decision makers. The authors urge to include abiotic flows as inherent part in ecosystem services classification systems such as CICES. This makes the application of the ES concept more holistic and consistent and will optimize it's integration power for practical planning and decision making.

Ecosystem services provided by a complex coastal region: challenges of classification and mapping.

A variety of ecosystem services classification systems and mapping approaches are available in the scientific and technical literature, which needs to be selected and adapted when applied to complex territories (e.g. in the interface between water and land, estuary and sea). This paper provides a framework for addressing ecosystem services in complex coastal regions. The roadmap comprises the definition of the exact geographic boundaries of the study area; the use of CICES (Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services) for ecosystem services identification and classification; and the definition of qualitative indicators that will serve as basis to map the ecosystem services. Due to its complexity, the Ria de Aveiro coastal region was selected as case study, presenting an opportunity to explore the application of such approaches at a regional scale. The main challenges of implementing the proposed roadmap, together with its advantages are discussed in this research. The results highlight the importance of considering both the connectivity of natural systems and the complexity of the governance framework; the flexibility and robustness, but also the challenges when applying CICES at regional scale; and the challenges regarding ecosystem services mapping.