The South Florida Ecosystem Portfolio Model - A Map-Based Multicriteria Ecological, Economic, and Community Land-Use Planning Tool

Framing Scenarios of Binational Water Policy with a Tool to Visualize, Quantify and Valuate Changes in Ecosystem Services

“…Products from any of the sub-models can be selected, compared or bundled to inform decision-makers. Assumptions, uncertainties and the strengths and weaknesses of the EPM are provided in detail by Labiosa et al [28]. The EPM does not maintain a steady subset of models within it, as it is flexible, to apply to different places and different problems; however, the submodels of the EPM need to be calibrated, depending on their intended application.…”

“…The Ecosystem Portfolio Model, an online decision support GIS tool, uses the concepts of the three "pillars" of sustainability as sub-models: the Ecological-Value Submodel (EVM), the Human Well-Being Submodel (HWB) and the Market Land-Price Submodel (MLP), which can be analyzed under various scenarios [23,27,28]. The EPM approach embraces traditional geospatial map overlay analysis for regional ecological planning, originally introduced by McHarg [29], and provides for multiple scenarios of ecosystem services provisioning to be visualized for suitability/capability analysis.…”

Developing an Ecosystem Services Online Decision Support Tool to Assess the Impacts of Climate Change and Urban Growth in the Santa Cruz Watershed; Where We Live, Work, and Play

“…From this perspective, ecological, economic, and societal or -quality-of-life‖ endpoints get represented separately, allowing decision-makers to consider ecological-economic-community value tradeoffs explicitly rather than combining these categorically-distinct values. Based on direct input from stakeholders and potential end-users (i.e., on-going meetings and interviews) the EPM focuses on three dimensions of land-use/land-cover (LULC) related anthropocentric value (i) ecological-value (based on various ecological criteria), (ii) market land-price, and (ii) indicators of (human) community quality-of-life or human well-being [16]. Each of these dimensions is implemented as a submodel of the EPM that generates -value maps‖ for a given land-use pattern, where the value map reflects changes in land attributes and patterns, as well as user preferences (the exception is the land-price model, which reflects market prices outside of the influence of the individual user) [16].…”

“…Developed previously for land use planning in South Florida, the Ecosystem Portfolio Model (EPM) framework is a map-based multicriteria evaluation tool that stakeholders can use to explore tradeoffs between valued ES at multiple scales for use within a participatory decision process [16]. It is integrated into a regional water management and land-use planning Web tool that models changes in ES under various scenarios for important drivers including climate change, land cover change, demographic changes, and regional economic changes [16].…”

“…It is integrated into a regional water management and land-use planning Web tool that models changes in ES under various scenarios for important drivers including climate change, land cover change, demographic changes, and regional economic changes [16]. For terrestrial ecosystems, land-cover change is one of the most important direct drivers of changes in ES [17].…”