Reducing uncertainty in ecosystem service modelling through weighted ensembles

Danny A.P. Hooftman, James M. Bullock, Laurence Jones, Felix Eigenbrod, José I. Barredo, Matthew Forrest, Georg Kindermann, Amy Thomas and Simon Willcock

Ecosystem Services, 2022, vol. 53, issue C

Abstract: Over the last decade many ecosystem service (ES) models have been developed to inform sustainable land and water use planning. However, uncertainty in the predictions of any single model in any specific situation can undermine their utility for decision-making. One solution is creating ensemble predictions, which potentially increase accuracy, but how best to create ES ensembles to reduce uncertainty is unknown and untested. Using ten models for carbon storage and nine for water supply, we tested a series of ensemble approaches against measured validation data in the UK. Ensembles had at minimum a 5–17% higher accuracy than a randomly selected individual model and, in general, ensembles weighted for among model consensus provided better predictions than unweighted ensembles. To support robust decision-making for sustainable development and reducing uncertainty around these decisions, our analysis suggests various ensemble methods should be applied depending on data quality, for example if validation data are available.

Keywords: Carbon; Committee averaging; Prediction Error; Accuracy; United Kingdom; Validation; Water supply; Weighted averaging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221204162100156X
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:ecoser:v:53:y:2022:i:c:s221204162100156x

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2021.101398

Access Statistics for this article

Ecosystem Services is currently edited by Leon C Braat

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