Representation Of Ecosystem Services Research Articles

Ecosystem services in salmon aquaculture sustainability schemes

The need to employ management strategies that recognize ecosystem services and their trade-offs is considered a cornerstone for the implementation of an Ecosystem Approach to Aquaculture (EAA), yet it is unclear how to operationalize these concepts. Here, the role of certification and sustainable seafood ranking programs (sustainability schemes) in maintaining ecosystem services and supporting an EAA was explored. The representation of ecosystem services within sustainability scheme criteria, as well as the attributes of those criteria, were assessed using marine salmon aquaculture as a case study. Criteria reflected a range of ecosystem services and support reducing pressure on those services. However, consideration of the resilience capacity of ecosystem services, recognition of enhancements to ecosystem services, and attributes that support cost-benefit analysis of salmon farming appear to be limited within sustainability scheme criteria. Overall, the farm-scale assessment approach of many sustainability schemes appears to be incongruent with the broader spatial perspective required to operationalize EAA.

Designing a network of green infrastructure to enhance the conservation value of protected areas and maintain ecosystem services

There is a growing demand for holistic landscape planning to enhance sustainable use of ecosystem services (ESS) and maintenance of the biodiversity that supports them. In this context, the EU is developing policy to regulate the maintenance of ESS and enhance connectivity among protected areas (PAs). This is known as the network of Green Infrastructure (GI). However, there is not a working framework defined to plan the spatial design of such network of GI.Here, we use the software Marxan with Zones, to prioritize the spatial distribution of different management zones that accommodate the needs of a network of GI. These zones included a conservation zone, mainly devoted to protecting biodiversity, a GI zone, that aimed at connecting PAs and maintaining regulating and cultural ESS; and a management zone devoted to exploiting provisioning ESS. We performed four planning scenarios that distribute the targets for ESS and biodiversity in different ways across management zones. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis by increasing ESS targets to explore trade-offs that may occur when managing together biodiversity and ESS. We use Catalonia (northeastern Spain) as a case study.We found that the representation of ESS could be achieved for intermediate targets in all scenarios. There was, however, a threshold on these targets over which trade-offs appeared between maintaining regulating and cultural ESS and biodiversity versus getting access to provisioning ESS. These “thresholds values” were displaced towards higher ESS targets when we moved from more strict to more flexible planning scenarios (i.e., scenarios that allowed mixing representation of objectives for biodiversity and ESS within the same zone).This methodological approach could help design a framework to integrate biodiversity and ESS management in holistic plans and decision making and, at the same time, meeting European mandates concerning the design of GI networks, or similar needs elsewhere.

Low-cost strategies for protecting ecosystem services and biodiversity

The selection of priority areas for nature conservation must balance the costs and benefits of conserving biodiversity, protecting ecosystem services, and permitting human activities or resource use. In this study, we selected priority areas for conservation in a seasonally dry tropical forest in Brazil and analyzed changes in the protection of ecosystem services and the conservation of plant biodiversity upon excluding areas with high opportunity costs (e.g., where income would be lost if natural areas were protected) and high population density. We identified two types of protected areas: sustainable use (SU) and strict protection (SP). Plant biodiversity (181 species) and supporting services (water balance, net primary productivity, and soil fertility) were used to determine the optimal locations of both types of protected areas. Provisioning services (water supply, fodder, and genetic resources) were used to determine SU priority areas, while regulating services (water purification, carbon storage, and erosion prevention) were used to determine SP areas. The selection of lowly populated or costly areas was associated with a small decrease in the representation of biodiversity (4% loss in SP and 6% loss in SU) and a large decrease in the representation of supporting (36% loss in SP and 31% loss in SU), regulating (41% loss in SP), and provisioning services (7% loss in SU). Our results reveal that selecting priority areas with low population density and low opportunity costs would decrease the overall representation of ecosystem services in protected areas but would still improve the cost efficiency of biodiversity conservation efforts.

Representation of ecosystem services by tiered conservation strategies

AbstractIn human‐dominated regions, protected areas are complemented by other conservation strategies (e.g., restrictive zoning, incentive payments) to maintain biodiversity and other ecosystem services. These strategies are often not mutually exclusive, with many areas covered by multiple (tiered) management strategies. However, it is not known whether tiering increases (or decreases) representation of ecosystem services. Here, we compare the representation of four ecosystem services by areas protected by both tiered and single conservation strategies (protected areas, restrictive zoning, and incentive payments to landowners) in a human‐dominated region (England). Tiering always coincided with the highest levels of stored carbon, sometimes coincided with high biodiversity and agricultural production, but never coincided with high recreational value. We also show that tiering is common in England and biased towards upland areas. Future evaluations of the effectiveness of conservation strategies should consider the degree of overlap of the different strategies fully to understand which are most effective.