Landowners are unlikely to enter into ecosystem service markets without quantitative estimates of the natural capital they process. However, it has been difficult for landowners to quantity the ecosystem services provided by their land or the degree to which management decisions alter these services. Models that estimate ecosystem service values are complex, operate on institutional computing platforms, output results at spatially or temporally inappropriate scales, or report service values in units not tradable in the market. A promising general approach to developing more accessible quantification tools is a distributed computing framework that makes use of the growing availability of spatially indexed bio-physical data and the increasing ability to link diverse computing platforms using web services.
Results/Conclusions
We describe a quantification tool that provides landowners with estimates of solar heat loading along user defined sections of streams. Users can assess the degree to which management practices such as adding or removing riparian trees creates heat loading credits or deficits. The tool consists of four components that are linked through web services: 1) a graphical user interface; 2) geodatabases that store spatially indexed parameter values; 3) process models that calculate ecosystem service values; 4) a reporting interface that returns model outputs to the user. We believe that this general framework can produce more robust and accurate quantification systems as well as more accessible ecological information to individual landowners.
