Modeling multiple ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, commodity production, and tradeoffs at landscape scales
Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2009 papers
Abstract
Nature provides a wide range of benefits to people. There is increasing consensus about the importance of incorporating these “ecosystem services” into resource management decisions, but quantifying the levels and values of these services has proven difficult. We use a spatially explicit modeling tool, Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to predict changes in ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and commodity production levels. We apply InVEST to stakeholder‐defined scenarios of land‐use/land‐cover change in the Willamette Basin, Oregon. We found that scenarios that received high scores for a variety of ecosystem services also had high scores for biodiversity, suggesting there is little tradeoff between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. Scenarios involving more development had higher commodity production values, but lower levels of biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. However, including payments for carbon sequestration alleviates this tradeoff. Quantifying ecosystem services in a spatially explicit manner, and analyzing tradeoffs between them, can help to make natural resource decisions more effective, efficient, and defensible.
Related Papers
- → Payments for ecosystem services: From local to global(2010)718 cited
- → Ecosystem services research in China: Progress and perspective(2010)171 cited
- Valuation of ecosystem services: research progress and prospects.(2012)
- → The Framework of Ecosystem Services for Economic Valuation Purposes: A Review(2019)
- → The Framework of Ecosystem Services for Economic Valuation Purposes: A Review(2019)