Ecosystem services lost to oil and gas in North America

Abstract

SCIENCE sciencemag.org water use. Before this work, little has been done in examining these types of data and their relations with ecosystem services at broad scales. ECOSYSTEM SERVICE TRADE-OFFS. NPP is the amount of carbon fixed by plants and accumulated as biomass. It is a fundamental and supporting ecosystem service that is the basis for all life on Earth (8). As such, the dynamics of NPP affect regional ability to provide a host of other essential ecosystem services (e.g., food production, biodiversity, wildlife habitat), which makes it a robust metric for broad evaluation of ecosystem services. Oil and gas activity reduces NPP through direct removal of vegetation to construct oil pads, roads, and so on. These satellite-derived measurements of

Evaluating renewable natural resources flow and net primary productivity with a GIS-Emergy approach: A case study of Hokkaido, Japan

“…NPP is so closely connected with primary producers that it could be considered as the foundation of ecosystem services. Thus, NPP has been widely used as a key indicator to reflect the ecosystem productivity1330313233.…”

Mutually-Beneficial Renewable Energy Systems

“…In a manner not seen since the pre-industrial era (Hornborg 2013), harvesting energy sources at the Earth's surface on a global scale implies a deep restructuring of physical space (Smil 2015;Huber and McCarthy 2017), exacerbating tensions around existing and future use of lands and oceans (Gasparatos et al 2017;Huber and McCarthy 2017). Although continued use of nonrenewable energy sources requires ongoing expansion (Allred et al 2015), compared to these conventional systems, renewable energy technologies require more physical space to deliver the same amount of power (i.e., lower rate of energy flow per unit of surface area) (MacKay 2010;Smil 2015;Capellán-Pérez, de Castro, and Arto 2017). Power densities of efficient petroleum and coal sources vary from around 1000-10,000 We/m 2 , while renewables generally range from highs for hydroelectricity of around 0.5-200 We/m 2 , to lower power densities for solar and wind around 0.5-10 and less than 1 We/m 2 for biomass and biofuels (Smil 2015;Capellán-Pérez, de Castro, and Arto 2017).…”

Multiscale guidance and tools for implementing a landscape approach to resource management in the Bureau of Land Management

“…However, expanding from evaluating effects of proposed actions at the scale of individual sites to considering effects at multiple spatial and temporal scales and on multiple natural resources is still a developing science (Haines and others, 2014;Jones and others, 2015). Unanticipated ecological and policy interactions may be evident only when examined at a variety of scales (Smith andothers, 2011, Sunderland andothers, 2015). Considering cultural, visual, and other human dimensions resources, some without defined tools for multiscale analyses, adds additional complexity.…”