The National Atlas for Sustainability: Mapping indicators and indices of ecosystem services

Background/Question/Methods

In general, government and non-governmental organizations and individuals do not have adequate spatially explicit information to allow them to fully account for the costs, benefits, and trade-offs among ecosystem services in response to specific decisions. Moving the ecosystem services framework from a conceptual basis to one supporting broad scale decision-making would be more likely with improved access to ecosystem services data. The U.S. Environmental Protection agency’s Office of Research and Development and its partners have proposed an indicators/indices approach for creating an online decision support tool that will allow users to view and analyze the geographical distribution of supply, demand, and drivers of change of ecosystem services. This tool, the National Atlas for Sustainability will report data at two primary scales: summarized by 12 digit hydrologic units at the conterminous U.S. scale and summarized by U.S. Census Block Groups at the local scale for selected communities only. The intent of the community scale work, which is initially being conducted in six pilot communities, is to evaluate ecosystem services within the urban environment, provide a mechanism to evaluate the equity of their distribution, and to explicitly examine the relationships between ecosystem services and human health. The Atlas effort is focusing on eight broad categories of ecosystem services: clean air; clean water; adequate water supply and timing; flood protection; food, fiber, and fuels; cultural, recreation, and aesthetic amenities; a stable climate; and habitat to support wildlife of concern.

Results/Conclusions

A prototype for the Atlas online decision support tool has been developed and has been populated with approximately 100 indicators spanning multiple ecosystem services for the national effort and with about 50 indicators for the first pilot community - Durham, North Carolina.  We will present an overview of the Atlas framework and online decision support tool and will demonstrate how we have compiled indicators to address ecosystem services. Indicators will be presented for all eight of the categories of ecosystem services. The Atlas effort is well underway but is an ambitious undertaking and still contains information gaps; we will highlight some of those gaps.  The intent of the Atlas effort is for it to be a living product and we anticipate continual improvement as ecosystem services science matures.