Browsing by Subject "InVEST"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Assessing the current and future status of aquatic and hydrologic ecosystem services in the French Broad River Basin(2017-04-28) Thompson, Brenna; Shapiro, Hannah; Warnell, KatieEcosystem services are the benefits that people receive from nature, and are an increasingly important component in conservation planning. Many of these ecosystem services are threatened, however, by land use change and development, climate change, and pollution. This project assesses the current state of several water-related ecosystem services in western North Carolina’s French Broad River Basin, which includes the city of Asheville, and compares this to a potential future state given predicted changes in development patterns and climate. We identify where sources of water-related ecosystem services are located within the watershed, how many people they serve, where threats to ecosystem services are located, and how ecosystem services and aquatic biodiversity may be affected by future climate and land use changes. Our findings show that climate change and development will have significant implications for the future provisioning and regulation of ecosystem services and the habitat of aquatic biodiversity in western North Carolina.Item Open Access Ecosystem Services in a Conservation Planning Framework(2009-04-24T13:53:29Z) Cooley, DavidNatural ecosystems provide several important services to society, including water purification, crop pollination, and carbon storage. Until recently, however, these services were not paid for in market transactions, giving landowners little incentive to provide services at optimal levels. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have addressed this by compensating landowners for the services they provide. PES have the potential to become powerful tools for conservation work, prompting the need for conservation planning for these services. In this project, the modeling tool InVEST was used to determine the spatial distributions of four ecosystem services (carbon storage, water purification, pollination, and biodiversity protection) for a study area in North Carolina. The outputs of these models were then overlaid to determine areas of the landscape that are important for the provision of multiple services. The individual and multiple ecosystem service maps were then used to help prioritize investment in specific property parcels based on the ecosystem services each provides under several land use change scenarios, including afforestation, wetland restoration, and the planting of riparian buffers.Item Open Access Identifying Pollution Sources for Management Prioritization in the Albemarle-Pamlico Watersheds(2019-04-25) Hillman, IsabelThe Albemarle-Chowan, Roanoke, and Tar-Pamlico watersheds have displayed degradation in water quality in recent history. To address concerns about the effects of poor water quality, the North Carolina Chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is interested in identifying where nutrients are concentrated across the landscape, and identifying the best management practices (BMP’s) available to address pollutants. To find where pollutant levels are highest, we used InVEST and SPARROW models, and converted raw outputs into hot spots, providing a smaller region for The Nature Conservancy to focus management actions. Within the agriculturally dominated hot spots, we identified 4 best management practices, riparian buffers, cover crops, ditch retention structures, and peatland restoration, as implementation options available to TNC. Scenarios run within InVEST models for each best management practice quantified the scope of action needed and estimated the reduction in nutrient concentrations from implementation. The results of these scenarios showed that TNC will have to address tradeoffs between efficiency and overall impact from best management practices. For example, cover crops were found to be the least efficient at removing nitrogen per acre, but due to the large amount of land available to plant cover crops on, this BMP has the largest potential for reducing nitrogen overall. To aid TNC in finding landowners to approach about using BMP’s, we ran a parcel prioritization, and identified landowners with large parcels containing large amounts of agriculture, peatland, and close to land that is already protected. The results of these analyses will help inform TNC staff as they take steps to improve water quality in the Albemarle-Pamlico region.