SYMP 10
CANCELLED - Monitoring Ecosystem Services: Standardizing Metrics and Serving Policy

Wednesday, August 7, 2013: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM
M100EF, Minneapolis Convention Center
Organizer:
Heather Tallis, The Nature Conservancy
Co-organizer:
Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Stanford University
Moderator:
Heather Tallis, The Nature Conservancy
In science, policy, resource management and conservation, what we measure wields strong influence over what we understand and how we act. Many monitoring systems are dedicated to tracking the nature and status of elements of the biophysical environment, but they seldom make connections between these environmental metrics and changes in any associated social benefits such as health, security, existence value, or cultural values. Similarly, another set of monitoring systems has been developed to track change in human wellbeing by monitoring health, monetary or development metrics, but few connect any component of these social changes to the environment. Without explicitly identifying and measuring these connections, we have only theory to guide us in understanding how socio-ecological systems work or in determining how a policy decision that causes environmental degradation or improvement may ultimately impact human well-being. In this symposium, we will show how emerging work on defining and tracking ecosystem service metrics provides a more comprehensive view of links between people and nature. The gaps in our current monitoring systems constrain science and policy from local to global scales, so we will address monitoring approaches at each scale. We will start with two global perspectives; one focusing on the data and metrics needed to track progress towards international agreements (e.g. the CBD) and to inform emerging assessments under the newly established Intergovernmental Policy-Science Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and another describing the newly launched Ocean Health Index as an example of how to align marine ecosystem service metrics with policy and science needs. Moving to the national scale, we will review what has been learned in the development of national ecosystem service indicators in South Africa, and discuss the relevance of these indicators to other countries. Drilling down to the local scale, a case study will demonstrate the kinds of ecosystem service metrics local marine managers find useful in practice. A second demonstration of local approaches to monitoring will detail several ongoing efforts to standardize in-situ observations of ecosystem services such as water quality regulation, carbon storage and sequestration, erosion control and crop pollination. Finally, we will end with a synthetic framework for standardizing measurements of ecosystem service tradeoffs and bundles, with examples of how data on multiple services, collected at multiple scales, can be synthesized and interpreted to inform both our scientific understanding of multi-service interactions and their significance to policy contexts across scales.
8:00 AM
 The demand for ecosystem service metrics on the international stage
Neville Ash, UNEP; Anne Larigauderie, Executive Director, DIVERSITAS
8:30 AM
 Ecosystem service indicators: Moving beyond supply to assessing the consequences for human wellbeing
Belinda Reyers, CSIR; Heather Tallis, The Nature Conservancy; Jeanne Nel, CSIR; Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Stanford University; Steve Polasky, University of Minnesota; Patricia Balvanera, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Patrick O' Farrell, CSIR; Juan Pablo Castaneda, Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Fiscales (ICEFI); Odirilwe Selomane, CSIR; Daniel S. Karp, University of California, Berkeley
9:00 AM
 What local marine managers want to know about ecosystem service change
Anne Guerry, The Natural Capital Project & Stanford University; Joanna R. Bernhardt, University of British Columbia; Spencer A. Wood, The Natural Capital Project, Stanford University; Jennifer Spencer, West Coast Aquatic
9:30 AM
9:40 AM
 Metrics for assessing ecosystem service tradeoffs and bundles
Patricia Balvanera, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Daniel S. Karp, University of California, Berkeley; Heather Tallis, The Nature Conservancy; Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Stanford University; Stacie Wolny, Stanford University; Steve Polasky, University of Minnesota; Bonnie L. Keeler, Institute on the Environment; Dick Cameron, The Nature Conservancy - California; Joshua Goldstein, The Nature Conservancy; Carlos Pacheco, Universidad de Guadalajara; Sandra Quijas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Paul West, University of Minnesota; Nirmal Bhagabati, World Wildlife Fund; Kate A. Brauman, University of Minnesota; Peder Engstrom, Institute on the Environment; James S. Gerber, University of Minnesota; Kent Kovacs, University of Minnesota
10:10 AM
 Standardizing in-situ observations of ecosystem services
Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Stanford University; Joanna L. Nelson, University of California, Santa Cruz; Leah Bremer, San Diego State University - University of California, Santa Barbara
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