The final ecosystem goods and services Voltron: the power of tools together

Abstract

Environmental decision-making benefits from considering ecosystem services to ensure that aspects of the environment that people rely upon are fully evaluated. By focusing consideration of ecosystem services on final ecosystem goods and services (FEGS), the aspects of the environment directly enjoyed, used, or consumed by humans, these analyses can be more streamlined and effective. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has developed a set of tools to facilitate this consideration. The central feature of FEGS is that ecosystems are viewed through the diverse ways people directly benefit from them. The National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS) Plus provides a framework for describing and identifying FEGS consistently. The standardization made available by NESCS Plus allows other tools and databases to interact using the NESCS Plus architecture and taxonomy, providing diverse insights for decision makers. Here, we examine the synergy of using the following four tools together: (1) the FEGS Scoping Tool; (2) the FEGS Metrics Report; (3) the EnviroAtlas; and (4) the EcoService Models Library. The FEGS Scoping Tool helps users determine what ecosystem services are relevant to a decision by harnessing FEGS understanding to enable communities to identify the relative importance of beneficiaries relevant to a decision and biophysical aspects of the environment of direct relevance to those beneficiaries. The FEGS Metrics Report can guide which metrics to monitor or model to represent those priority services. The EnviroAtlas, a powerful tool containing geospatial data and other resources related to ecosystem services, chemical and non-chemical stressors, and human health, and the EcoService Models Library, a database of ecosystem models, are two tools that support users in mapping and modeling endpoints relevant to priority services. While each of these tools is valuable on its own, together, they provide a powerful approach to easily incorporate and operationalize ecosystem services efforts into different parts of decision-making processes across different types of decisions. We illustrate how these integrated tools can be used together with a hypothetical example of a complex environmental management case study and the combined benefit of using the FEGS tools together.

Human well-being and natural infrastructure: assessing opportunities for equitable project planning and implementation

“…Benefits can include water quality improvement, mitigation of floods and droughts, food provision, employment, recreation, educational and cultural values, and many more (Hartig et al, 2014;Sandifer et al, 2015). Tools that bring these benefits into a single framework are important, as is the primary research that underpins our understanding of benefits and subsequent efforts of translate research into information that can be used in analysis (Sharpe et al, 2023). Building on the broad portfolio of work by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center's Engineering With Nature (EWN) program, the research presented here seeks to expand the range of benefits attributed to NI projects and the ability of agencies to account for them in planning.…”