Using Remote Sensing to Quantify Ecosystem Services for Improved Coastal Decision Making - Gulf Coast Workshops
Abstract
Through a series of workshops, in partnership with NASA and The Nature Conservancy, The Balmoral Group is working to find the best approaches for using Earth Observations to inform ecosystem service assessments. Workshops are being held in each of the five Gulf Coast states with the objectives of 1) Exploring remote sensing data and models that can be used to quantify ecosystem services and values, 2) Identifying opportunities for using Ecosystem Service information to improve Gulf restoration and coastal management, and 3) Identifying data gaps and needs associated with the use of remotely sensed data.
The theory and practice of ecosystem service assessment and valuation have matured considerably in the last decade. While there is still plenty of diversity in the data sources and models used for ecosystem service assessment and valuation, the standards and recommended frameworks that have emerged recently can provide practitioners with refined choices that align with their goals for ecosystem service assessment. The goals of an ecosystem service assessment will generally define the spatial scale; for example, if the goal is to use ecosystem service information to develop a coastal management plan for a large region, then it is likely that spatial ecosystem service assessment will be required. Earth Observations provide a particularly important data source to facilitate the ecosystem service modeling required for mapping ecosystem services. While there are numerous Earth Observation possibilities or combinations of sensors and algorithms, the measures of land cover, topography, vegetation (NDVI, ENVI, LAI), ocean color (Chl-a, CDOM), and temperature/rainfall are the most widely use Earth Observation products for ecosystem service assessment. Importantly, the focus of our work is on application of Earth Observations to practical tasks of resource management, goal-setting and decision-making. This presentation will include: 1) the fundamentals of ecosystem service assessment and valuation, 2) the current status of the science of ecosystem service mapping in general, 3) the current status of Earth Observations used in ecosystem service mapping, 4) several examples of coastal ecosystem service assessments and valuation, and 5) the findings from surveys and workshops with coastal resource managers.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.B33L2845D
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1632 Land cover change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 6304 Benefit-cost analysis;
- POLICY SCIENCES