Assessing Future Ecosystem Services: a Case Study of the Northern Highlands Lake District, Wisconsin

By Garry D. Peterson, T. Beard, B. Beisner, E. Bennett, Stephen R. Carpenter, Graeme Cumming, C. Dent, T. D. Havlicek. 2003

225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Northern Highlands Lake District of Wisconsin is in transition from a sparsely settled region to a more densely populated one. Expected changes offer benefits to northern Wisconsin residents but also threaten to degrade the ecological services they rely on. Because the future of this region is uncertain, it is difficult to make decisions that will avoid potential risks and take advantage of potential opportunities. We adopt a scenario planning approach to cope with this problem of prediction. We use an ecological assessment framework developed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to determine key social and ecological driving forces in the Northern Highlands Lake District. From these, we describe three alternative scenarios to the year 2025 in which the projected use of ecological services is substantially different. The work reported in this paper demonstrates how scenarios can be developed for a region and provides a starting point for a participatory discussion of alternative futures for northern Wisconsin. Although the future is unknowable, we hope that the assessment process begun in this paper will help the people of the Northern Highlands Lake District choose the future path of their region.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/40016e97898b5d6f11ec7186bb0064bc24899be5

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Citations in the corpus

Participatory Scenario Planning for Protected Areas Management under the Ecosystem Services Framework: the Doñana Social-Ecological System in Southwestern Spain (2011, background): “…al. 2006), desertification and land degradation (Kok et al. 2004), land-use changes and their impacts (Jessel and Jacobs 2005), regional planning (Peterson et al. 2003a), coastal planning under climate change (Tompkins et al. 2008), conservation-development projects (Sandker et al. 2007),…”
Young Scholars Dialogue, part of a Special Feature on Scenarios of global ecosystem services Linking Futures across Scales: a Dialog on Multiscale Scenarios (2007, methodology): “In these cases, theatrical or other creative visual representations are often used to both develop and communicate scenarios across diverse groups, for example, in the Southern African MA scenarios (Biggs et al. 2004) and the Wisconsin northern lakes scenarios (Peterson et al. 2003a).”
Governance and the Capacity to Manage Resilience in Regional Social-Ecological Systems (2006, background): “Hence, our understanding of, for example, what makes participation and deliberation effective remains rudimentary (e.g., Rayner 2003, Rowe and Frewer 2004).”
Insight, part of a Special Feature on Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Shooting the Rapids: Navigating Transitions to Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems (2006, background): “In the NHLD, which is in a backloop, changes are happening rapidly (Peterson et al. 2003 a ).”
A multi-scale, multi-model approach for analyzing the future dynamics of European land use (2008, background): “A popular type of discussion support is the use of scenarios (Rotmans et al. 2000; Peterson et al. 2003; Xiang and Clarke 2003; Wester-Herber 2004).”
Marine seismic surveys and ocean noise: time for coordinated and prudent planning (2015, methodology): “Scenario planning has been used extensively in the commercial sector, is a well-developed tool in business planning (Schoemaker 1995), and is emerging as an essential element in studies of the environment (Peterson et al. 2003a, b) and global change (Bennett et al. 2003).”
Research, part of a Special Feature on Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Cultural Landscapes: Analysis and Management Options Exploring Futures of Ecosystem Services in Cultural Landscapes through Participatory Scenario Development in the Swabian Alb, Germany (2013, methodology): “Key Words: ecosystem services: landscape development ; participatory scenario planning; Germany; multifunctional landscapes; regional development; quality of life; rural areas”