Incorporating birds into tools for measuring ecosystem services: A case study from Central California

Background/Question/Methods

While there is growing evidence that birds and other wildlife provide ecosystem services, there have still been relatively few efforts to develop a market that can incentivize actions to support and improve these services.  In California, we are working to develop a tool that will quantify the ecosystem services provided by riparian areas and enhanced by riparian restoration.  This tool has modules that incorporate management effects on stream water temperature, native pollinator habitat, and riparian bird habitat into an overall ecosystem services score.  Each module is built on the best available science.  For birds, the module draws upon more than a decade’s worth of research that has focused on developing multi-scale habitat models and validating these models by measuring the response of birds to riparian restoration.  

Results/Conclusions

Using this information, we have developed simple metrics that can be used to evaluate a site (typically 10 to 100 ha) with respect to the opportunity (landscape context), value, and site capacity for providing habitat for riparian birds.  With data from a simple landscape analysis (using aerial imagery) and a single field visit, users of the tool can generate a score for the current condition of the site and then compare this to the potential condition of the site after investment in restoration or enhancement. This effort demonstrates the potential for incorporating management effects on bird habitat into ecosystem services quantification tools.  Specifically, the large amount of high quality information already available on the bird species habitat associations make them good candidates for these types of efforts.