In the Spotlight

A Price Tag for Nature

The Ecosystem Services Research Program (ESRP) in EPA's Office of Research and Development is studying the ways ecosystem services benefit human health and well-being in the Tampa Bay Estuary Watershed as part of a larger research effort to better understand the value of ecosystem services.

Tampa Bay is Florida's largest open-water estuary, supporting one of the world's most productive natural systems and is home to a large and growing urban center. With the success of much of the population's activities depending on the quality of the Tampa Bay ecosystem, it is vital that planners incorporate accurate values of ecosystem services into future scenario projections for the area.

Tampa Bay Research

News sources with stories on this research:

A Price Tag on Nature

Coral Reef Expedition

EPA to Study Coral Reefs in U.S. Virgin Islands

EPA and NatGeo: Putting a Price on Paradise

Posted: February 4, 2009

Singer Joni Mitchell crooned, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." Today the presence of thousands of parking lots in the United States illustrates just one example of how human-induced change can negatively affect the benefits — or ecosystem services — provided by the environment that we have come to rely upon to live.

What are ecosystem services?

In essence, ecosystem services are nature's bounty. Ecosystems provide our food, our clothes, our fuels and many of the commodities used to manufacture the products we use in our day-to-day lives. Less well recognized, ecosystems also purify and store our water, help clean our air, regulate our climate, provide protection from natural hazards such as hurricanes, pollinate our crops and manage our pests. They have the amazing ability to process and detoxify our wastes. Ecosystems also give us places to play and reflect along with contributing to our cultural, inspirational, and intellectual well-being by providing a sense of place.

Human activities, however, have an impact on ecosystem services. For example, when we pave the natural landscape with a hard (impervious) surface, we gain a useful commodity but we also may lose something. Soil and vegetation provide a natural filter for removing pollutants carried by storm water runoff, facilitating groundwater recharge which provides us with drinking water, and regulating the amount of runoff or flooding that may occur during a storm event. The impervious surface becomes an unrestricted pathway for motor oil, gasoline, harmful bacteria, and other pollutants and debris that may be carried into our waterways. These are the same waterways that provide habitat for fishes and other aquatic life, sources of drinking water, places to play, and pipelines to our estuaries and bays.

Anne Neale, a research ecologist in the EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory, wants to ensure that the balance between things people want (e.g., convenient roadways and plentiful parking), and the functionality that the environment needs to maintain itself are understood and managed in a manner that is sustainable to both. The emphasis of Neale's research is to provide information so that ecosystem services provided by the environment are considered in land-use decision-making.

Neale focuses on the interdependence between people, the environment, and ecosystem services. She is leading the Landscape Characterization and Mapping Team which is part of the EPA Ecosystem Services Research Program. The program is designed and conducted by EPA's Office of Research and Development to improve our knowledge about how to protect and restore the services of nature. Developing a National Atlas of Ecosystem Services for the United States is Neale's main focus.

The National Geographic Society, one of the world's largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations, is collaborating with EPA to build and provide tools that decision makers need to understand the impact of human activities on nature's ability to provide and maintain ecosystem services. It is hoped the science and ecosystem services-based tools will help decision makers — from individual land owners to federal policy-makers — apply sound science and a clearer understanding of the impact of an action on ecosystem services. Clearly their collective goal is to avoid the unintended consequences caused by less-informed decision-making.

Neale admits, "This is an extremely challenging project and it's very exciting to be working with the National Geographic Society. Simply stated, this collaborative effort combines EPA's ability to develop the science necessary to quantify ecosystem services, with National Geographic's world-renowned expertise at delivering information to the public in a way that generates interest and is easily understood."

In 2009 the National Geographic Society, along with their partner Nature-Serve will launch LandScope America , a web-based tool designed to inform and inspire conservation. LandScope America will bring together an interactive collection of maps, data, photographs, videos, and stories, collected from a variety of sources, and will present them in a dynamic and accessible format. It will contain ecosystem service maps (e.g., important habitat and water pollution mitigation information) developed by Neale and the Ecosystem Services Research Program. The tool will allow users to build different ecosystem service maps and will allow them to zoom in to their area of interest to better understand the impact changes in land use will have on the services themselves. These richly-detailed maps will be displayable at multiple scales (e.g., national scales down to political boundaries) for the United States allowing decision makers to consider impacts beyond their own jurisdictions or natural boundaries.

The EPA and the National Geographic Society collaboration integrates many scientific disciplines to produce knowledge and tools to make smarter decisions in the face of changing human needs and changing landscapes. Human-induced change is inevitable and with these new tools and techniques perhaps making smarter decisions may also be inevitable.

http://epa.gov/nerl/features/eco_services.html

Year of the Reef

Every four years the world's leading coral reef scientists gather to share their research efforts to protect these threatened living structures that provide habitat for thousands of fish and invertebrate species. For the first time in 30 years, the International Coral Reef Symposium was held in the United States mainland in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

EPA scientists joined their colleagues July 7-11 to present results of their ongoing research. The meeting is one of the highlights of a coral reef conservation effort called the International Year of the Reef.

EPA coral reef experts conduct research in Florida, the Caribbean Sea and other locations where coral reefs are in danger. They are providing the critical information that will lead to better assessments of coral reef conditions that can help with their conservation. EPA coral reef research is intended to provide coral reef and other resource managers better tools and information to make better decisions.

Learn about the EPA research presentations.

More information on coral reef research.

Partnerships with EPA's Ecosystem Services Research Program

EPA's scientists are establishing partnerships with states, tribes and territories, communities, universities, federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, and others to ensure the best scientific tools and information are developed for use in making decisions about ecosystem services.

Collaborations provide an opportunity for outside input into the planning and development of the science and help scientists identify the needs of those who use the science products. Collaborations provide an opportunity for outside input into the planning and development of the science so that scientific tools and information is developed to meet the needs of our partners.

Formal partnership agreements have been made with the following organizations:

Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.
The purpose of this agreement is to share scientific expertise and knowledge. One area of collaboration will be to apply a suite of computer models developed by the Gund Institute to research projects planned by EPA to study ecosystem services in four different parts of the country: the plains in the Upper Midwest, the Willamette River Valley in Oregon, coastal areas of North and South Carolina and Tampa Bay in Florida.
National Geographic Society.
The purpose of this collaboration is to develop methods to map ecosystem services and to create maps displaying these services for the U.S. at multiple scales. The collaboration will enhance shared interests in educating the public about the variety of ecosystem services in the U.S.

Scientific Experts Employed

Highly skilled scientific experts are joining forces with scientists in EPA’s Ecosystem Services Research Program to expand research on ecosystem services. These special government employees work at universities and other scientific organizations and are hired on a temporary and part-time basis to work with staff on research projects.

“We will benefit greatly from the expertise of these top leaders in the field of ecosystem services research,” said Rick Linthurst, director of the Ecosystem Services Research Program.

The program plans to hire approximately 15 special government employees who are national and international leaders in ecosystem services research to work with EPA scientists.

Scientists:

Dr Allyson Beall
Professor
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Washington State University Pullman, Wash.
Waters of the West, University of Idaho,
Moscow, Idaho

Dr Beall will provide expertise in participatory system dynamics modeling to assist with the integration of diverse conceptual frames and multiple data types that encompass the scientific and social aspects of ecosystem services.

Dr. David Yoskowitz
Professor
Department of Finance, Economics and Decision Sciences at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Dr. Yoskowitz will work with the research team in the Ecosystem Services Research Program’s Tampa Bay study, providing expertise to study economic valuation of ecosystem services in Tampa Bay, Florida. He will evaluate the potential and approach for economic valuation of ecosystem services in Tampa Bay, map valuation techniques to identify landscape and ecosystem services, integrate valuation of ecosystem services using benefit transfer methodology and develop an implementation plan assessing the relationship between ecological function and the value of ecosystem services for Tampa Bay.

Dr. Lisa Wainger
Research Associate Professor
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Solomons, Maryland

Dr. Wainger will assist the research team in EPA’s Future Midwestern Landscapes (FML) study, specifically in the construction of a “multiple services” future scenario for the study area in the Midwest. This task requires determining production functions for various ecosystem services, codifying these spatially and economically, and modeling the resulting landscape change. Dr. Wainger’s work involves gathering and manipulating spatially-referenced agricultural and ecological data sets, estimating ecological production functions, employing valuation approaches, and modeling landscape change.

Dr. Wainger will help to develop or refine socio-economic or risk indicators describing how changes in ecosystem services can affect stakeholders' issues and management decisions and assist with the development of techniques for measuring, mapping, and valuing ecosystem services for the Ecosystem Services Research Program.

Dr. Mitchell J. Small
Professor
Civil & Environmental Engineering/Engineering & Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Dr. Small will provide his expertise to support and inform the development of an innovative, online decision support platform that offers EPA, states, tribes, local communities and resource managers the ability to integrate, visualize, and maximize use of diverse data, models, and tools at multiple scales to generate alternative decision options and understand the consequences of management decisions on the sustainability of ecosystem services, their value and human well-being.

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