Wednesday, August 5, 2009: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM
Mesilla, Albuquerque Convention Center
OOS 24 - Integrating Science and Policy for Watershed Sustainability: Balancing Hydrological Services, Quality of Life, and Economic Vitality
Ecosystem services are the benefits humans receive from ecosystems and are the direct product of tightly coupled social-ecological systems. As human populations and consumption expand and wildlands shrink, ecosystem services, once plentiful and inexpensive, are increasingly scarce and costly. An innovative and rapidly emerging approach for sustaining the provision of ecosystem services is the creation of conservation payments designed to compensate land users who adopt practices that conserve or restore the ecosystems generating important services to society. Payments for hydrological services are arguably one of the most important and rapidly growing among publicly financed conservation programs, largely due to the critical situation of globally declining quality and quantity resources. PHS programs operate at the interface between the social, economic, and biophysical systems: While their overall objective is to enhance watershed sustainability by eliciting certain desirable decisions and actions in human-social systems driven largely by incentives from the associated economic systems, PHS programs often involve significant feedbacks, interactions, and tradeoffs between the different dimensions of coupled social-ecological systems, which may result in unpredictable effects on sustainability. Recent studies are starting to unravel the complex relationships between conservation payment policies and coupled social-ecological systems for a range of different ecosystem services and socioeconomic and cultural contexts. This symposium will emphasize emerging and novel research focused on enhancing interdisciplinary understanding of the complex interactions, feedbacks, synergies, and trade-offs among multiple dimensions of coupled social-ecological systems in response to conservation payment programs focused on hydrological services, and how these processes scale up to determine sustainability at the local, regional and global scales. In particular, we have structured the symposium to both highlight and integrate recent advances in research being conducted at the interface between conservation policy and science aimed at enhancing the provision of clean and plentiful water resources to society. Specifically, our goal is to bring together scientists (especially those actively participating in interdisciplinary research on complex problems) to discuss their findings and challenges from different perspectives, such as: quantifying the hydrological provided by different ecosystems, assigning “value” (e.g., monetary, cultural, quality of life, etc.) to those services, and integrating information from different ecological and human dimensions into meaningful metrics or indices that are useful policy makers. We have attached a preliminary list of potential speakers identified to date who would be invited to participate in this symposium upon approval by ESA.
Organizer:H. Asbjornsen, Iowa State University
Co-organizer:K. Halvorsen, Michigan Technological University
Moderator:K. Halvorsen, Michigan Technological University
8:00 AMOOS 24-1Payment for ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes
David Zilberman, University of California-Berkeley
8:20 AMOOS 24-2Connecting land use systems with ecosystem services production: Examples from global to local scales
Kathleen A. Farley, San Diego State University
8:40 AMOOS 24-3The art of paying for nature's services
Joan Hoffman, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
9:00 AMOOS 24-4Balancing conservation policy: Targeting ecosystem service provision with feedstock production for the bioeconomy in the Midwestern US
Silvia Secchi, Southern Illinois University
9:20 AMOOS 24-5Complexity, costs and services of urban ecohydrology: From urban footprints to regional climate mitigation
G. Darrel Jenerette, University of California Riverside, Karrin Alstad, University of California Riverside
9:40 AM Break
9:50 AMOOS 24-6Mexico's payment for hydrological services program: Challenges and opportunities
Jennifer Alix-García, University of San Francisco
10:10 AMOOS 24-7Achieving sustainable urban watersheds through incentive-based decentralized stormwater mitigation
Audrey L. Mayer, Michigan Technological University, Allison H. Roy, US Environmental Protection Agency, William D. Shuster, US Environmental Protection Agency, Hale W. Thurston, US Environmental Protection Agency, Matthew A. Morrison, US Environmental Protection Agency
10:30 AMOOS 24-8Landscape change in an urbanizing watershed: Integrated assessment of ecological and cultural dimensions of adaptive capacity
Adrian L. Vogl, Texas State University, Susan Roberts, Texas State University, Timothy A. Fotinos, Texas State University, John Klier, Texas State University
10:50 AMOOS 24-9Evaluating the structure of a compensation program to improve the provision of water, biodiversity, and rangeland habitat on private lands
Michael Sorice, Texas A & M University, Wolfgang Haider, Simon Fraser University, J. Richard Conner, Texas A & M University, Robert B. Ditton, Texas A & M University
11:10 AMOOS 24-10Eco-Cultural rehabilitation of the mesopotamian marshes of southern Iraq
Michelle L. Stevens, CSUS

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