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Humans are the dominant ecological force on earth

We are in the middle (optimistically) of a battle we are losing. 10 times more protected area in the last 60 years, yet we still face an environmental catastrophe from multiple fronts. In an amazing blog post by Peter Kareiva and co-authors, many of the reasons why are outlined. Central to the solution is the need for humanity to couple development and conservation. Pitting the 2 billion pending more people over the next decades against the ideas of conservation (e.g. conservation means halting human growth, agriculatural development, etc), will be counter productive. We need to find new ways to "demonstrate how the fates of nature and of people are deeply intertwined".

#conservation #note #Nature Conservancy

Bringing together hackers and global environmental change

We've been working to organize an event to bring together the people in the NYC area and beyond that are interested in hacking in areas of global environmental change. We have posted the sign-up and details here, EcoHackNYC

A successful program in Namibia to turn wildlife management over to local communities has also generated profits for the people.

Monitoring forest loss using FORMA

FORMA is a new tool for monitoring forest loss at high spatial resolution ~1km at quarter year intervals. It was designed to measure, track, and enable action against forest loss that is contributing to global CO2 emissions, in support of the UN-REDD program. While FORMA is not designed to directly analyse ecosystem service loss or degradation of natural capital, the links are readily apparent, as well are the links to the Map of Life project. The FORMA project represents a significant step forward in open informatics framework thinking, and states,

For accountability, the global community will need access to a monitoring system that provides detailed, accurate and timely identification of deforestation in conservation-payment areas. To ensure the broadest access and credibility, the monitoring system should be truly transparent and reproducible, making data, algorithms and processing workflows publically available and usable in free or inexpensive software.

The authors indicate that FORMA is a prototype system that should be updated and improved by specialists. I would love to see the system they have build designed as a framework where the models could be improved, reviewed, and deployed to generate global predictions of forest loss. Beyond that, I would love to see the data easily integrated into secondary analysis, such as the prediction of lost services and degradation of natural capital. The models necessary to predict either of the later could be deployed in the same framework, where models are proposed, tested, reviewed and deployed, and then the data could be made freely available.

Another future step for FORMA would be the integration of ground-truthing into outputs and model inputs such as crowd-sourced contributions of visually vetted high-resolution landsat images from the same areas over the same time. This could be a project of widespread interest and similar crowd sourcing informatics systems have already been developed for other scientific questions (see Vizzuality and Zooniverse).

The team behind FORMA do not see CGDEV as the final home for FORMA but more important they will keep it completely open source, hoping to encourage multiple deployments that will spurn honesty and innovation. FORMA is leaps and bounds ahead of any other project in terms of their thinking toward data openness and the need for transparent informatics pipelines and algorithms.

Hammer D, Kraft R, Wheeler D. FORMA: Forest Monitoring for Action - Rapid Identification of Pan-tropical Deforestation Using ModerateResolution Remotely Sensed Data. Center for Global Development. Working Paper 192. 2009. Full text

#FORMA #forest loss #informatics #data #CGDEV #REDD

Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature

This report amounts to an overview and justification of the TEEB approach to preserving ecosystem services. In addition to the description of how and why the TEEB approach is useful, there are some insightful passages in the report.

TEEB Tiered approach

Indentify and assess value: Spiritual, cultural, monetary

Estimate and Demonstrate value: While previously focusing on a cost benefit analysis, TEEB 2010 takes an approach closer to the pluralism advocated in Wegner et al. (2011)

Capturing value. Incorporate ecosystem values in decision making. This does not imply that all ecosystem services should be traded in a market, but instead that a combination of environmentally focused subsides, payments for services, taxation etc should be deployed.

The report identifies two broad reasons why valuing ecosystem services: First, to demonstrate why and why prosperity and in particular poverty reduction depend on ecosystem services, and second, why successful environmental protection will be dependent on the fair distribution of the costs and benefits associated with ecosystem services and their sustainable use. In both cases, the outcome is recognition that long term management of our stocks of natural capital is necessary to ensure human well-being.

A failure to do so is unacceptable: namely, to permit the continued absence of value to seep further into human consciousness and behaviour, as an effective ‘zero’ price, thus continuing the distortions that drive false trade-offs and the self-destructiveness that has traditionally marked our relationship with nature.

TEEB, 2010 TEEB, 2010. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature: A synthesis of the approach, conclusions and recommendations of TEEB. European Commission. Full text

The Green Climate Fund (GCF)

The Natural Capital blog has served as a place to record some informal thoughts on key papers related to valuing ecosystem services. The primary point of the literature review has been to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of data repositories, web-based informatics, and web-based mapping in the domain. Up to this point, it has been that 1) in the best cases, these technologies are in very early stages of development in this community, and 2) in the worst cases they don't even seem to be considered as necessary tools.

I was just reading If you build it, they will come …if you build it. which gives some nice insights into the first day of meetings for the Transitional Committee on the formation of the UNFCCC’s Green Climate Fund (GCF). While the scope of the GCF is well beyond funding just projects that protect ecosystem services as they relate to climate change it is clear they will play a substantial role. Among some key areas of discussion, highlighted in Joshua Wiese's post, three specific areas caught my attention,

Achieving transparency, efficiency and independence

Be demand driven and have the ability to track impact.

Find and catalyze new sources of funding.

Each of the above areas has overwhelmingly clear needs for advances in the community's existing informatics and analysis tools. To achieve transparency and efficiency, the GCF should be establishing or promoting open, centralized repositories for data relating to funded and proposed projects. One outcome of such a resource would be the ability to map and explore progress and types of projects the GCF is enabling, similar to the NGO Aid Map. By making data upload a requisite term for funding, the same solutions would also enable the GCF to more efficiently track the progress and impact of funded projects, Furthermore, the data could be a key resource for performing gap analyses to be used by both the GCF and by developing countries to identify what areas of advancement are not being used. Finally, by creating simple exploration tools to see what sorts of projects are soliciting funding and what outcomes can be expected from those projects, data and mapping may help the GCF catalyze new funding sources.

The GCF could achieve greater efficiency and have a broader impact if the committee quickly recognizes its own need for informatics tools. Funds should be established early to create data repositories and tools that help building knowledge from past and present projects and guide the direction of future projects. To achieve transparency, the outcomes should be made open and freely available.

#GCF #UNFCCC #project summary

The need for pluralism in evaluating ecosystem services

The cost-benefit approach to evaluating ecosystem services quantifies the change in monetary value created by ecosystem services in response to various policy decisions. The method uses actual value, or at least willingness to pay, as the deciding basis for what is the best policy decision. The core argument of this work, is that a pure cost-benefit analysis can not capture the full array of necessary considerations regarding how and why to conserve ecosystems.

For example, status-seeking behaviour may accentuate the discrepancy between the prices paid by wealthy tourists for a fashionable safari experience in a nature reserve, and those afforded by poor local communities for other uses of the same reserve (Brooks, 2005). Cost-benefit analysis based on these prices is therefore likely to indicate tourism, and the exclusion of local people from other competitive uses, as the optimal land-use choice for that reserve.

The authors argue that a new framework for evaluating ecosystem services should be pluralistic, taking into account plural values and ethical attitudes. Furthermore, such a system needs to more transparently demonstrate scientific uncertainty about the socio-ecological systems and the underlying mechanisms of valuing many components of the system.

The paper is really about the system in a general sense, but seeing it through my binary tinted glasses it can easily be seen as further support for open informatics frameworks for performing these analyses. Frameworks that are not limited to singular means of valuing benefits or singular measurements of value, but instead to grow into diverse toolkits for analyses based on the context of the policy decisions being evaluated.

Wegner G and Pascual U. Cost-benefit analysis in the context of ecosystem services for human well-being: A multidisciplinary critique. Global Environmental Change. In press. Full text

#ecosystem services

On the one hand, it’s politically impossible to stop growth. On the other hand, it’s biophysically impossible to continue it ad infinitum. So, which impossibility is fundamentally impossible? Well, you know, I’ll take my chances with trying to change the politically impossible, because I don’t think I can change the biophysically impossible.

Herman Daly

The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Science-Policy Interface

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) recently set their attention to tracking the causes and consequences of destructive ecosystem change. The Busan outcome is a blueprint for international governance with an ultimate goal of a IPCC-like agency, the IPBES. However, because the Busan outcome is a blueprint for governance and not for science, the authors offer some thoughts on how the science will unfold in this context.

Four functions identified in the Buscan outcome as key roles of the IPBES

(a) “identify and prioritize key scientific information needed for policymakers at appropriate scales,”

(b) “perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity and ecosystem services and their interlinkages, which should include comprehensive global, regional, and, as necessary, sub-regional assessments and thematic issues at appropriate scales and new topics identified by science,”

(d) “prioritize key capacity-building needs to improve the science-policy interface….”

The authors argue that in light of these four functional operations of IPBES, the science should be directed to reflect real policy options, scenarios, and outcomes. In other words, models of ecosystem service and biodiversity changes should be built around real world policy options and what outcomes will result from competing options. The authors draw support to this conclusion from the Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA), the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). Similarly, in assessments that are independent of existing policy decisions, the science should generally offer various options and paths to mitigating the potentially destructive outcomes.

Next, the authors deal with issues of scale. Primarily, an important consideration of scale in this scientific work will be that it, "be undertaken at the smallest geographical scale consistent with capturing all relevant effects of the biophysical and social processes involved". I think that it is inherent in this statement that in most all cases, analyses will need to be performed over numerous geographic and temporal scales in order to capture the effects in any particular area. This is going to require enormous amounts of data. One identified source would be GEO BON, however, GEO BON as of now does not collect socioeconomic observations. I think this fact can be extended to many large data collection and aggregation projects to date, they strangely still fail to correctly weight the anthropocentric importance in global monitoring systems.

A major shortcoming in current work is in assigning value to the components of ecosystem services and biodiversity. The authors point out that while the MA was able to record changes in ecosystem services, they were unsuccessful at assigning a value to those changes. A key role of IPBES will be to bring in data from sources otherwise not directly linked to the primary science being performed to begin deriving and measuring those values.

The authors close by stating that the IPBES will only be as strong as the science that underlies it, but also that the IPBES will be most successful if used to coordinate the scientific effort around key areas, including scale, scope, and questions being answered such that real world decisions can be made from that science.

The paper will provide a good foundation from which the IPBES can clearly define their relationship with the underlying science. However, in my opinion, it still comes just short of stating the importance of common publishing data repositories and data discovery tools. They say, "Although it is important to strengthen assessments, including the tools of synthesis, all assessments are ultimately only as strong as the supporting science." I would go further, and say that the long-term strength of that science will be directly based on the strength of the tools of syntheses, discovery, and reuse.

Perrings C et al. The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Science-Policy Interface. Science. 2011. Vol 331 No 6021. Full text

#IPBES #policy

Natural capital and ecosystem services of soils

Like many of the services provided by ecosystems, those of soil formation and function are still very unknown. Among the necessary considerations when evaluating the services and natural capital of soils are,

(1) soil natural capital, characterised by standard soil properties well known to soil scientists;

(2) the processes behind soil natural capital formation, maintenance and degradation;

(3) drivers (anthropogenic and natural) of soil processes;

(4) provisioning, regulating and cultural ecosystem services; and

(5) human needs fulfilled by soil ecosystem services.

Table 1. Ecosystem roles mentioned by different classification systems. (rotated from original)

Ecosystem role de Groot R, (1992) and de Groot et al., (2002) Noël & O'Connor (1998) Daily (1999) Ekins et al., (2003a) and Ekins et al., (2003b) MEA (2005) De Groot (2006) Life-support Regulation functions Life-support Regeneration processes Life-support Supporting services Regulation functions Production Production functions Source Production of goods Source Provisioning services Production functions Regulation Regulation functions Sink Stabilising processes Sink Regulating services Regulation functions Habitat provision Habitat functions NC NC NC NC Habitat functions Physical support NC Site NC NC NC Carrier functions Information and culture Information functions Scenery Life filling functions, preservation of options Human health and welfare Cultural services Information functions

Building from those basic concepts, the authors attempt to expand the ideas of ecosystem services to better reflect the processes of soils not comprehensively covered in previous literature. See Table 2 in publication for more complete details on the functions the contexts of those function identified.

The paper is a really valuable contribution to the understanding of soil based processing and the benefits they produce. The network of function and drivers they were able to illustrate is impressive, going as in depth as how processes will be altered by soil types (something maybe not as impressive to soil ecologists, but in this context impressive none the less).

The framework they provide is a great first step to building some of the automated methods and reporting tools we have been discussing. Applying their findings to existing maps of soil types as well as using future climate and land cover projections to predict how those services will change and create feedback into the system.

Dominati E. Patterson M. Mackay A. A framework for classifying and quantifying the natural capital and ecosystem services of soils. Ecological Informatics. 1010. Vol 69 Iss 9. Full text

Dr. Paul Raskin giving some really clear and nicely articulated ideas on shifts in thinking and particularly how the developing world can really succeed under a mechanism of growth that has learned from the environmental mistakes of the developed world.

#Paul Raskin

Anthrome

Some wildly cool maps were published by Ellis et al., that attempted to reclassify the world not according to the traditional biomes, but instead by anthromes, the anthropocentric classification of nature.

Ellis EC et al., Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000. 2010. Global Ecology and Biogeography. Vol 19 No 5. Full text

#anthrome #mapping

Understanding relationships among multiple ecosystem services

Humanity's use and recognition of the importance of natural resources has led to diverging trends, where some ecosystem services have risen over history (e.g. food and flood control) while most others have declined (e.g. flood control). One reason for this is that we often have a are time, or fail completely, at valuing and comparing multiple ecosystem services simultaneously. A key example is that of coastal mangroves. These ecosystems have often been converted to shrimp farms, when a simple comparison of the profits gained from the short-term farming are far less than the lost services such as wild stock nurseries and storm protection.

There have been several studies, including a couple reviewed here, that have found that plans targeting one ecosystem service will often do a poor job of protecting many services. The same can be said for biodiversity and services. After a review of some key research, the authors formalize 3 propositions for future research (concatenated here),

Proposition 1: Relationships among multiple ecosystems services are better identified and assessed by integrated social-ecological approaches than with either social or ecological data alone.

Proposition 2: Understanding the mechanisms behind simultaneous response of multiple services to a driver and those behind interactions among ecosystem services can help identify ecological leverage points where small management investments can yields substantial benefits.

Proposition 3: Managing relationships among ecosystem services can strengthen ecosystem resilience, enhance the provision of multiple services, and help avoid catastrophic shifts in ecosystem service provision.

The authors go further in their discussion, suggesting greater use of anthromes in research, offering a set of ecosystem services that may have linkages that would lead to increased gain from minimal management investments (see Table 1 in publication), and arguing the importance of understanding what interactions between services lead to or affect regime shifts.

Bennett EM, Peterson GD, Gordon LJ. Understanding relationships among multiple ecosystem services. Ecology Letters. 2009. Vol 12 No 12 Full text

#ecosystem services

Do protected areas reduce poverty?

Protected areas are often attributed with reduced economic production through limiting agriculture and exploitation of natural resources. However, the authors also point out that the increased tourism and flow of benefits from ecosystem services may help to actually alleviate poverty not increase it. The authors attempt to resolve the question of net gain or net loss by comparing communities close surrounding protected areas with similar communities not near protected areas.

Figure 1. Andam et al.,

The work of the authors seems to indicate a few key findings. First, many protected areas, at least in the two study regions of Costa Rica and Thailand, were established in areas that generally experience high levels of poverty according to census reports. This might be from a wide variety of forces. One plausible link briefly mentioned in the paper is that these areas are generally far from economic centers and have little economic potential, thus reducing the cost of establishing a protected area.

The authors found support for the fact that protected areas were linked with decreased poverty over large (decades) time scales. The exact mechanism for this finding wasn't derived, but the authors suggest a host of potential reasons,

tourism business opportunities, investments in human and physical capital by national and international agents, and the maintenance of ecosystem services

Andam KS et al., Protected areas reduced poverty in Costa Rica and Thailand. PNAS. Vol 107 No 22. 2010 Full Text

#example #protected areas #poverty

Conservation Planning for Ecosystem Services

Like many other papers I've read, this paper begins by addressing the number one shortfall in successful conservation planning based on the value of ecosystem services, the poor characterization and understanding of the flow of services. Plans to conserve biodiversity are generally straight forward, with "features" (i.e. the species) and "targets" (i.e. the goals of conservation). However, the protection of both biodiversity and services together becomes far more complex.

The authors focus on 6 services and the services' impact in the Central Coast ecoregion of California. The services were as follows, carbon storage, crop pollination, flood control, forage production, outdoor recreation, and water provision. The authors decision was based on ample data for these services in this region. The authors then address three key questions,

(i) How much of each service is being generated by each land parcel?

(ii) What are the spatial associations between the lands required for protecting biodiversity and supplying different ecosystem services?

(iii) How much of each ecosystem service—plus biodiversity protection—is provided by a network of lands prioritized for biodiversity, compared to networks designed for multiple services?

The authors found that many of the services had distinct spatial distributions. Furthermore, there was little spatial correlation across the services.

Figure 2 from Chan et al.

The authors are able to highlight that conservation strategies that do not account for biodiversity, or only minimally count for it, pose a potential risk, since at least in this region this strategy will lead to little protection for biodiversity. Inversely, they found that if biodiversity was the central target for conservation, most services targets were met, with only small additional areas needed to fill the gap.

The paper uses MARXAN to prioritize conservation networks based on the 6 services and biodiversity. The authors found that the tool still lacks some key features for this use. Each service has its own planning requirements (i.e. protecting pollinators is different than creating recreation), and so each layer should be able to have its own suitability layer. Next, MARXAN does not handle any measurements for potential for loss. It is more useful is conservation can target areas of the network based on their associated short and long-term risk. See text for full list of suggested improvements.

The paper is significant in its careful weighting and comparison of trade-offs across different conservation plans. As stated by the authors, using this type of approach in conservation planning could create a significant shift in way of thought as well as the geographic areas being protected.

Chan KMA, et al., Conservation Planning for Ecosystem Services. PLoS Biology. 4(11): e379. 2006 Full text

#example #ecosystem services #agriculture #Modeling #MARXAN #mapping #RWRI

Science for managing ecosystem services

The MA was a significant step forward in both the formalization of community goals and progress and in the understanding of the current strengths and weaknesses of methods used. It also helped to highlight that future trends in human use of ecosystem services will have significant negative effects (unsustainable use and/or loss of key regulating services) without key societal intervention.

The paper makes a key point that the decoupling of many ecosystem services in research frameworks makes the research incomplete.

For example, a road network that alters species richness and fragments a landscape will at the same time have direct impacts on hydrology and landscape nutrient cycles and thereby alter water supply and water quality independent of any direct impacts of species richness on freshwater resources. Moreover, human responses to the road network will have further effects on ecosystem structure, hydrology, nutrient cycling, and freshwater resources.

This is a conceptual shift in for many researching biodiversity that may not resonate or alter approaches immediately, but it does highlight a void in research that could be filled even by making more people aware.

Also important for our own work, the paper discussed the fact that most models for social-ecological systems have been developed for the needs of particular sectors (e.g. agriculture) and do not quite work in the context of the MA or future assessments. The paper calls for the building of models from "scratch". Furthermore, coupling modeling with scenario methods are highly important to this work.

It is clear that all of humanity relies on ecosystem services to survive, but one difficulty in attributing common valuation to these services is that 'incremental changes' to their flow are very difficult to value. In the same vein, understanding how these changes affect the most vulnerable members of human society is one of the most important contributions that this work can have immediately. For example, understanding how to value ecosystems services in developing countries will help further guide aid agencies in investing in these in parallel with infrastructure investments.

Carpenter SR et al., Science for managing ecosystem services: Beyond the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. PNAS. 2009. Vol 106 No 5. Full text

#millennium assessment #ecosystem services

Time to deliver

Valuing ecosystem services as a means to bring conservation main stream have not succeeded yet. This is in part due to only a vague understanding of how many of the services work or emerge from the systems. Still, it is urgent as many of the systems and their services are rapidly degrading.

In a nutshell:

Valuing nature is central to mainstreaming conservation, but is not an end in itself

Success hinges on a better understanding of ecosystem production functions and on integrating research (and experimentation) into the development of new policies and institutions

The Natural Capital Project is designing practical tools for this purpose, including InVEST, a system for quantifying ecosystem services produced under different scenarios

The use of these tools in contrasting settings is opening up important conservation opportunities

Like many fields, ecosystem service sciences need to be made credible, replicable, scalable, and sustainable. It seems like a highly valuable system to begin applying web-based automated informatics systems.

Daily GC et al., Ecosystem services in decision making: time to deliver. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 7: 21–28. Full text

#ecosystem services #example #Hawaii

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