Ecosystem Services Modeling as a Tool for Defining Priority Areas for Conservation

Abstract

Conservationists often have difficulty obtaining financial and social support for protected areas that do not demonstrate their benefits for society. Therefore, ecosystem services have gained importance in conservation science in the last decade, as these services provide further justification for appropriate management and conservation of natural systems. We used InVEST software and a set of GIS procedures to quantify, spatialize and evaluated the overlap between ecosystem services—carbon stock and sediment retention—and a biodiversity proxy–habitat quality. In addition, we proposed a method that serves as an initial approach of a priority areas selection process. The method considers the synergism between ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation. Our study region is the Iron Quadrangle, an important Brazilian mining province and a conservation priority area located in the interface of two biodiversity hotspots, the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes. The resultant priority area for the maintenance of the highest values of ecosystem services and habitat quality was about 13% of the study area. Among those priority areas, 30% are already within established strictly protected areas, and 12% are in sustainable use protected areas. Following the transparent and highly replicable method we proposed in this study, conservation planners can better determine which areas fulfill multiple goals and can locate the trade-offs in the landscape. We also gave a step towards the improvement of the habitat quality model with a topography parameter. In areas of very rugged topography, we have to consider geomorfometric barriers for anthropogenic impacts and for species movement and we must think beyond the linear distances. Moreover, we used a model that considers the tree mortality caused by edge effects in the estimation of carbon stock. We found low spatial congruence among the modeled services, mostly because of the pattern of sediment retention distribution.

Spatial associations of ecosystem services and biodiversity as a baseline for systematic conservation planning

“…When modelling ecosystem services, the limited availability of specific information at regional scale is a drawback. Hence, many studies examine a restricted array of ecosystem services (Egoh et al, 2008;Anderson et al, 2009;Duarte et al, 2016). We dealt with this situation by gathering information from scientific literature and governmental datasets.…”

Decision support tools for forest landscape restoration: Current status and future outlook

“…Decision support tools for biodiversity conservation focus on selecting priority areas for protection or reserve establishment, with a focus on intact forest areas or large habitat patches. Habitat quality is often used as a proxy for biodiversity using InVEST's habitat quality model, which estimates the extent of vegetation in a landscape that has reduced threats from highways, built-up areas, and cultivated lands (Baral et al 2014;Duarte et al 2016;Lin et al 2017). But habitat quality models have yet to be validated across the wide range of conditions over which they are applied.…”

Spatial Pattern of Carbon Sequestration and Urban Sustainability: Analysis of Land-Use and Carbon Emission in Guang’an, China

“…These data are input into InVEST, and the carbon pool density data required by InVEST were mainly summarized from other papers [44][45][46]. …”

“…The parameters in Table 1, required by InVEST, are summarized from the literature [44][45][46] and existing remote sensing image classification data. We used ArcGIS to process the outcomes of InVEST to spatially express the carbon stocks of the study areas.…”