Mapping Ecosystem Services for the Southeast United States: Conservation and Restoration Priorities for Water Purification

This methods brief focuses on water purification by natural land cover, which removes non-point-source pollutants from runoff water before they reach waterways. This analysis maps natural land cover within the likely flowpaths of water from agricultural areas to waterways. Regional priority areas for the restoration of additional natural land cover in the flowpaths and for the conservation of existing natural land cover in the flowpaths are identified based on the amount of agricultural land and the proportion of flowpaths that are made up of purifying natural land cover. Spatial datasets for these priority areas and associated metrics are available on ScienceBase

Developing a State-Level Natural and Working Lands Climate Action Plan

Natural and working lands—forests, wetlands, coastal, and agricultural lands—provide many benefits, including supporting key economic sectors, enhancing community resilience to hazards such as fires and floods, and contributing to climate mitigation by storing large amounts of carbon. North Carolina recently completed a Natural and Working Lands Climate Action Plan with recommendations for conserving, restoring, and managing these lands to preserve and enhance their benefits. This guide, aimed at other states interested in developing similar action plans, walks through the planning process, helpful resources, and the tracking of plan implementation—using examples from North Carolina’s experience

Ecosystem Services Conceptual Model Application: Bureau of Land Management Solar Energy Development

Interest in using ecosystem services to integrate considerations of people and the environment continues to grow in federal agencies. One method that can help agencies incorporate ecosystem services into decision making is the use of ecosystem services conceptual models, which link changes in biophysical systems caused by an intervention to human well-being outcomes. Evidence-based ecosystem services conceptual models can provide efficiency and consistency in application, transitioning ecosystem services from an interesting concept to an actionable approach for natural resource management. Despite the potential usefulness of these models, there are few examples available to build from and little published detail on how to implement them. This report provides an example of an ecosystem services conceptual model for solar energy development on lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The Bureau of Land Management wants to facilitate solar energy development on suitable land in the southwestern United States while minimizing negative impacts on social, cultural, and ecological systems. With agency staff, researchers at Duke's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Solutions developed a model that captures the potential outcomes of the installation and operation of solar energy facilities on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. An accompanying evidence library provides a summary of the currently available evidence for each relationship in the model and an assessment of the strength of that evidence. The ecosystem services conceptual models could improve and help to streamline environmental assessments and help the Bureau of Land Management achieve its socio-economic strategy

Exploring the Use of Ecosystem Services Conceptual Models to Account for the Benefits of Public Lands: An Example from National Forest Planning in the United States

A shared understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs to people from alternative land management strategies is critical to successful decision-making for managing public lands and fostering shared stewardship. This study describes an approach for identifying and monitoring the types of resource benefits and tradeoffs considered in National Forest planning in the United States under the 2012 Planning Rule and demonstrates the use of tools for conceptualizing the production of ecosystem services and benefits from alternative land management strategies. Efforts to apply these tools through workshops and engagement exercises provide opportunities to explore and highlight measures, indicators, and data sources for characterizing benefits and tradeoffs in collaborative environments involving interdisciplinary planning teams. Conceptual modeling tools are applied to a case study examining the social and economic benefits of recreation on the Ashley National Forest. The case study illustrates how these types of tools facilitate dialog for planning teams to discuss alternatives and key ecosystem service outcomes, create easy to interpret visuals that map details in plans, and provide a basis for selecting ecosystem service (socio-economic) metrics. These metrics can be used to enhance environmental impact analysis, and help satisfy the goals of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 2012 Planning Rule, and shared stewardship initiatives. The systematic consideration of ecosystem services outcomes and metrics supported by this approach enhanced dialog between members of the Forest planning team, allowed for a more transparent process in identification of key linkages and outcomes, and identified impacts and outcomes that may not have been apparent to the sociologist who is lacking the resource specific expertise of these participants. As a result, the use of the Ecosystem Service Conceptual Model (ESCM) process may result in reduced time for internal reviews and greater comprehension of anticipated outcomes and impacts of proposed management in the plan revision Environmental Impact Statement amongst the planning team

Advancing consistent socio-economic monitoring of coastal ecosystem restoration through collaborative metric development

Ecological restoration programs increasingly aim to provide socio-economic and environmental benefits. However, monitoring of socio-economic outcomes of these programs lags behind monitoring of ecological outcomes. Socio-economic methods are less established, managers have less experience, and metrics used vary, stymieing evaluation and adaptive management. Here we demonstrate that logic models and stakeholder engagement can be used to identify core socio-economic metrics across various types of restoration, focusing on coastal restoration in the Gulf of Mexico. Across four major restoration types (oyster restoration, habitat restoration, recreation enhancement, and water quality improvement), core metrics were identified as changes in jobs, restoration expenditures, recreational activity, cognitive function, and subjective well-being. These metrics can provide a starting point for increased and more consistent monitoring of socio-economic outcomes. The collaborative, science-based, and replicable process we developed to identify core metrics can be applied to other ecosystems and management actions to expand monitoring and evaluation of socio-economic impacts