A quantitative approach to evaluating ecosystem services

Rebecca A. Logsdon and Indrajeet Chaubey

Ecological Modelling, 2013, vol. 257, issue C, 57-65

Abstract: Ecosystem services are benefits that humans receive from their environment. The amount of research that has been done on the concept of ecosystem services has increased substantially in recent years. However, the concept of ecosystem services has been slow to affect actual land management, economic and policy decisions. We argue that one reason for this lack of application is the disparity of methods to quantify ecosystem services. Much of the current ecosystem service research has been done on valuing ecosystem services, with little work done to quantify them so that they can be used as an end point of watershed management. We propose methods to quantify five provisional and regulatory ecosystem services with inputs related to ecosystem functions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods by applying them to a study watershed and then running three extreme land use scenarios for the watershed: all forested, all urban and all corn. Results show that the methods capture the differences in land use on ecosystem service provision. These methods can be a building block for quantification of the full suite of ecosystem services by incorporating more biophysical models and developing validation methods.

Keywords: Ecosystem services; Quantification; Land management; Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380013000902
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:257:y:2013:i:c:p:57-65

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2013.02.009

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Modelling is currently edited by Brian D. Fath

More articles in Ecological Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().