Ecosystem Services in a Conservation Planning Framework
Date
2009-04-24
Author
Advisors
Mercer, Evan
Fay, John
Olander, Lydia
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Abstract
Natural 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.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/992Citation
Cooley, David (2009). Ecosystem Services in a Conservation Planning Framework. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/992.Collections
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