Conservation Planning for Ecosystem Services

By Kai Ma Chan, M. Shaw, D. R. Cameron, Emma Underwood, Gretchen Daily. PLoS Biology, 2006

1,220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite increasing attention to the human dimension of conservation projects, a rigorous, systematic methodology for planning for ecosystem services has not been developed. This is in part because flows of ecosystem services remain poorly characterized at local-to-regional scales, and their protection has not generally been made a priority. We used a spatially explicit conservation planning framework to explore the trade-offs and opportunities for aligning conservation goals for biodiversity with six ecosystem services (carbon storage, flood control, forage production, outdoor recreation, crop pollination, and water provision) in the Central Coast ecoregion of California, United States. We found weak positive and some weak negative associations between the priority areas for biodiversity conservation and the flows of the six ecosystem services across the ecoregion. Excluding the two agriculture-focused services—crop pollination and forage production—eliminates all negative correlations. We compared the degree to which four contrasting conservation network designs protect biodiversity and the flow of the six services. We found that biodiversity conservation protects substantial collateral flows of services. Targeting ecosystem services directly can meet the multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity goals more efficiently but cannot substitute for targeted biodiversity protection (biodiversity losses of 44% relative to targeting biodiversity alone). Strategically targeting only biodiversity plus the four positively associated services offers much promise (relative biodiversity losses of 7%). Here we present an initial analytical framework for integrating biodiversity and ecosystem services in conservation planning and illustrate its application. We found that although there are important potential trade-offs between conservation for biodiversity and for ecosystem services, a systematic planning framework offers scope for identifying valuable synergies.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e996485dd4ad534a2fd0973dc0538bbc29cb8f33

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Integrating ecosystem services and environmental planning: limitations and synergies (2011, background): “…the international debate around ESS (cf. Kanning 2005), whereas some researchers in the field of ESS assessment have begun to consider planning applications (e.g. Bastian 2004; Chan et al. 2006; Hein et al. 2006; Troy and Wilson 2006; Willemen et al. 2008; Burkhard et al. *Corresponding author.”
Assessing Land Use Change and Its Impact on Ecosystem Services in Northern Thailand (2016, background): “For each land use, the estimates of carbon pool, namely dead organic matter, above and belowground biomass and soil organic matter in soil are needed [16,20,40,41] to subsequently put into the land use maps and then create an integrated map showing the carbon stock contained in each cell.”
Interactions Among Ecosystem Services Across Land Uses in a Floodplain (2014, background): “Moreover, when simultaneous gain is difficult to achieve, biophysical trade-offs can still be managed for suboptimal but compatible valuable gains (Chan et al. 2006, Trabucchi et al. 2013).”
Ecosystem service bundles for analyzing tradeoffs in diverse landscapes (2010, background): “In addition, correlations between ecosystem services in this study were found to be much stronger than correlations between ecosystem services found in three other papers (14, 18, 19) that”
Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism (2010, background): “This, however, cannot be done unproblematically as some ecosystem elements and services are rival in their provision at different geographical scales (Kareiva et al., 2007; Chan et al., 2006).”
The Concept of Ecosystem Services Regarding Landscape Research: A Review (2011, background): “A lot of studies dealt with these challenges aiming at providing spatial datasets to map landscape functions (e.g. Chan et al., 2006; Haines-Young et al., 2006; Gimona and Van der Horst, 2007; Egoh et al., 2008; Meyer and Grabaum, 2008).”
Spatial dynamics of ecosystem service flows: A comprehensive approach to quantifying actual services (2013, background): “Early efforts to map ecosystem services via modeling (Eade and Moran, 1996; Chan et al., 2006) or spatially explicit value transfer (Troy and Wilson, 2006) paid little attention to ecosystem service flows.”
Towards an assessment of multiple ecosystem processes and services via functional traits (2010, background): “…the third set of examples analyses the potential of trait–service clusters to improve the quantification of ecosystem services at different spatial scales, which currently is still largely lacking (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Chan et al. 2006; Beier et al. 2008; Nelson et al. 2009).”
Unifying measures of biodiversity: understanding when richness and phylogenetic diversity should be congruent (2013, background): “It necessarily involves emphasizing or accommodating multiple priorities including social and economic valuations (Meffe & Viederman, 1995), the functioning of ecosystems and accounting for the services they provide (Chan et al., 2006) and the preservation of the diversity of life.”
Ecosystem Services in Decision Making: Time to Deliver (2009, background): “Much more work is needed now, on integrating multiple services at regional and global scales (eg Nelson et al. page 4 in this issue; Chan et al. 2006; Naidoo and Ricketts 2006; Brauman et al. 2007).”
Multi-functional landscapes in semi arid environments: implications for biodiversity and ecosystem services (2010, background): “The lack of congruence between ecosystem services and biodiversity priorities evident in our study concurs with similar studies (Chan et al. 2006; Anderson et al. 2009; Egoh et al. 2009), which show that ecosystem services approaches will not ensure complete biodiversity protection.”