We have a new paper published this week in Frontiers in Environmental Science on estimating ecosystem services along the western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). This was one of the most challenging academic efforts I’ve been involved in, and is the culmination of nearly 5 years of effort since co-author Barbara Neumann and I conceived the idea during a serendipitous meeting at a Columbia-Kiel University workshop on marine science back when we were both postdocs.
Ecosystem services, the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems to human well-being, is a concept that’s received a lot of attention as a critical abstraction at the interface between science and policy. Scientists have gotten very good at understanding ecosystem processes and relating them to other ecosystem processes. Economists and social scientists are getting better at quantifying the social and economic costs of environmental change. What’s frequently missing, however, is a framework for linking specific ecosystem processes to social or economic outcomes. This becomes really important if you want to effectively manage resource use; ecosystems perceived as being more socially and economically valuable (i.e. providing more ecosystem services), for example, might warrant more nuanced management.
Ecosystem services are most useful when we can consider their distribution in space and time. However, linking ecosystem services to specific places and times is methodologically challenging. One way to do this is to use expert elicitations via the matrix method. In this approach a collection of experts is formally interviewed in a consistent, scripted fashion to identify “consensus” estimates of service supply from specific ecological units. This approach is typically applied to landscapes, where the ecological units are geographically fixed (think about a mosaic of forest and grassland, each providing different services, but fixed in space).
But what about the marine environment? Certain ecological features, such as a shoal, gyre, or recurrent eddy can be geographically fixed, but away from such features the marine environment is a fluid mosaic that is not fixed in time or space. We decided to try an approach that was agnostic to location, and instead elicited expert opinions of service supply from the seascape units derived from an objective analysis of macronutrients, chlorophyll, temperature, and salinity in Bowman et al., 2018.
For our group of experts we tapped the investigators of the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project (many thanks to all of you!). It was quite a challenge to reconcile the divergent methods – when we conducted the interviews we hadn’t worked out all the details of the seascape unit classification system – but we got there in the end. The approach could use some further refinement before it’s ready to produce a data product for resource managers, however, we hope the proof-of-concept will stimulate further effort at LTERs and elsewhere in the marine environment!
