Using Ecosystem Services for Identifying Priorities for Restoration and Mitigation

JimmyKagan's picture
Submitted by JimmyKagan(0)2 March, 2011 - 15:53

As part of a National Cooperative Highway Research Program project, a team including Jim Boyd and I developed this draft document looking at  a "Comparison of the Ecological and Economic Outcomes of Traditional vs. Programmatic, Multi-Resource Based Approach esseses".  The team's hypothesis was that the largest determinant of ecological and economic success was the location of the mitigation or restoration sites.  The document makes a good case for the use of Multi-Resource approaches.  However, the paper did not delve into potential advantages of any one approach.

I was hoping to identify a group of people interested in analyzing the effectiveness, both ecologically and from an ecosystem services, of a number of analytical "practical" approaches of identifying priorities. These would be approaches currently used in different parts of the US (or the world) to identify parcels or areas in which could provide the greatest benefits of one or multiple resources.

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Jeremy Sokulsky
Jeremy Sokulsky26 weeks 1 day ago

Quantified & Reporting vs Traditional

We are finding a multiple (>100%) increase in effectiveness of projects that are implemented under an ecosystem accounting structure over projects that do not have a benefit quantification and reporting structure. The primary driver of this increased effectiveness is the consideration of how the project site relates to the overall watershed or system goals. The secondary benefit is greater clarity in project design relationship to benefits. The need to quantify and report benefits that are either grant funded or in response to regulatory requirements focuses all parties on effectiveness and creates accountability.

The basic structure of this approach is illustrated at the Environmental Incentives website http://enviroincentives.com/approach.

This may be a somewhat different analysis than the one conducted in this paper, but it seems to be in the same vain and could be worth some collaboration. Jeremy Sokulsky