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Basic Information
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The Ecosystem Services Research Program (ESRP) in EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) is setting a new strategic direction to meet compelling needs for better understanding the implications of human impacts on ecosystems and the services they provide. We define ecosystem services as the products of ecological functions or processes that directly or indirectly contribute to human well-being. These processes and functions of ecosystems, the foundation of our health, livelihoods and well-being, are now at risk worldwide.
Two lines of policy and research activities converged to launch the ESRP's new focus on conserving ecosystem services through proactive decision-making.
First, scientific and policy reports over the last decade document the need to conserve irreplaceable services provided by ecosystems (e.g., NAS, 1997; BOSC, 2005; EPA Stewardship Initiative, 2006; EBASP, 2006; SAB C-VPESS 2007). For example, in 1997, the National Academy of Sciences report entitled EPA's Position in the Broader Research EntESRPrise, recommended that:
EPA should include social systems in its ecological research; specifically issues of: resource use; individual and collective decision-making; economic, social, political, and legal structures; human settlement and land use; ethics and equity; technological innovation and diffusion; interactions of social processes with physical/chemical, and biological processes. . . Human society is dependent on the goods and services provided by ecosystems, including clean air, clean water, productive soils, and generation of food and fiber. A growing recognition of this dependence alters the way we conceptualize environmental problems. Reducing the harmful environmental impact of human activities on ecosystems, which in turn provide humans with essential goods and services, is of direct benefit to society.
During the 1990's, EPA began exploring new ways to implement its environmental policies that moved beyond regulatory enforcement to include voluntary programs. For example, EPA's Office of Water began its watershed-based policy initiative, which familiarized the public with the concept that watersheds are important and manageable systems. The Office of Water used a variety of outreach techniques to publicize the concept that “we all live downstream,” i.e., each of us lives in a watershed and the decisions and actions of each of us affect all of us. Similarly, in 1994, EPA Administrator Browner began the Community Based Ecosystem Protection (CBEP) initiative, which focused on collaborative decision-making as a way to engage stakeholders as co-creators of management strategies to improve environmental conditions within their communities.
In the mid-1990's, the ESRP began four important research activities to support these new environmental policy directions. This research established the undESRPinnings for the ESRP's new focus on conserving ecosystem services. These were:
- Alternative Future Scenarios for place-based analyses
- Pushing the frontiers of interdisciplinary research
- Assessing regional-scale vulnerability to ecosystem stressors
- Incorporating socioeconomic issues into restoration research
Alternative Future Scenarios for place-based analyses
ESRP scientists were among the first to develop techniques for using alternative future scenarios to inform decision-making. Alternative future scenarios were created for six studies conducted at local to regional scales in Pennsylvania, Southern California, Iowa, Illinois, and two locations in western Oregon. The studies were carried out in collaboration with stakeholders, resource management agencies, and academia. These groups worked together to examine alternative management strategies and their likely effects on ecological and social outcomes, including many endpoints that today would be regarded as “ecosystem services.”
| Ecological Endpoints | Other Endpoints |
|---|---|
| Surface watrer quality | Scenic elements |
| Stream discharge | View Quality |
| Flood hydrograph | Population densities in urban areas |
| Sediment Export | Population densities in agricultural areas |
| Habitat (for a variety if terrestrial and aquatic plants and animals) | Water availability for urban, industrial, and agricultural uses |
| Risk of wildfire | Farm income |
| Nitrate-nitrogen export | Costs of public services |
The Willamette Basin Alternative Futures study was the largest study in this group. This study was peer-reviewed in 1997 by EPA's Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), who commented:
“the research consortium involving USEPA, three major universities and several federal agencies organized through the Corvallis Laboratory is the most significant opportunity to advance ecosystem risk assessment at the watershed and regional levels of scale. This research team is in the position to couple GIS maps with ecological processes which will provide a scientific basis for formulating public policy. . . .The useful endpoint of this program is the development and demonstration of the Alternative Futures Analysis. This can and will be formatted as the first test of the new EPA Ecosystem Risk Assessment Protocol at the watershed and regional scale.”
For more information: ESRP Poster #1 (PDF) (1 page, 155KB)
Pushing the frontiers of interdisciplinary research
ORD's extramural Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program and the National Science Foundation (NSF) pioneered interdisciplinary watershed studies in their co-sponsored solicitations for research on Water and Watersheds, which ran from 1995 - 1999 (USDA joined as co-sponsor in 1998). Beginning in 1996, these solicitations required grantees to demonstrate research collaboration between physical, biological and social scientists - a radically different requirement for funding than had ever existed before. Many researchers funded under this program later commented that this required them to undertake new partnerships within their universities, bringing together social and natural scientists -- often for the first time.
EPA funded 55 grants at academic institutions across the U.S. that addressed a wide variety of watershed management, conservation, and restoration issues. In 2001, the Ecological Processes and Effects Committee of the EPA Science Advisory Board (SAB) reviewed the Water and Watershed program, noting:
“the Water and Watersheds program is an important component of STAR and covers areas critical to the Agency's goals of protecting water quality and participating in collaborative management of watershed resources. . . many of the projects have generated models and other decision tools that can be used to analyze the effects of watershed management schemes on nature and people who live in the watershed.”
These tools broke new ground by rigorously linking knowledge about natural processes on the one hand and the social and political drivers of human activities, on the other hand.
For more information: ESRP Poster #5 (PDF). (1 page, 433KB)
Assessing regional-scale vulnerability to ecosystem stressors
In 1998, the ESRP initiated the Regional Vulnerability Assessment program (ReVA) to provide regional-scale, spatially explicit information on the extent and distribution of both ecological stressors and of sensitive resources, so that management actions could be prioritized on the basis of relative risk. The ReVA program has created tools to enable users to assess the future consequences of potential environmental changes under alternative future scenarios and to communicate trade-offs related to economic and quality of life issues associated with alternative environmental policies.
Major results from ReVA are:
Developed a portable web-based toolkit, known as ReVA's Environmental Decision Toolkit that enables users to evaluate 11 different methods for integrating existing spatial data to address questions about current and likely future conditions at regional scales. This toolkit can be used in any region of the United States.
Forecast major drivers of change to 2020 for mid-Atlantic region including: land use change, spread of non-indigenous species, forestry and mineral resource extraction, and changes in air pollution. These likely effects of these stressors were synthesized using the ReVA toolkit to identify locations likely to bear the greatest future impact of these stressors. The toolkit thus assists decision-makers in using their limited resources to target high-priority needs in a proactive way.
Developed and refined a number of statistical landscape models for proactively estimating future impacts of alternative policies. These models can be used to assess vulnerability to groundwater contamination, non-point source pollution in water, and habitat suitability; these impacts affect water-provisioning services as well as cultural services related to wildlife and biodiversity.
Established client partnerships to evaluate risk management options through alternative future scenario analysis at a number of scales - national, regional, state and local. These partnerships implement true applied research in which the ESRP works with partners to apply research results to real-life decisions to ensure applicability, access, and technology transfer to decision-makers.
Worked in multidisciplinary partnerships within EPA and with other federal agencies, states, and local governments.
To date, ReVA studies have been conducted primarily in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the U.S.; a major new study is now underway to assess the effects of bio-fuels development on the ecosystem services of the Midwest.
For more information: ESRP Poster #7 (PDF) (1 page, 152KB)