Knowing the “shed” of one another’s ecosystem service –shared consequences of individual land management decisions

Background/Question/Methods

The concept and analysis of watersheds profoundly influences and informs cooperative land management.  Increased awareness and understanding of ecosystem services suggest that it is more than just water that can be managed cooperatively at a landscape scale.  Improved quantitative understanding of the geographic flows of many different services can provide insights for policy and cooperative management schemes to more effectively manage landscapes for other services.  For example, our recent work shows that native pollinator abundance on specialty crops depends jointly on farm management practice and the quality of the landscape surrounding the farm.  Thus, a grower’s decision about land management affects the delivery of pollination service to the grower’s farm but to some extent, also affects the delivery of service to nearby growers.  What are the consequences of these decisions for these two scales?

Results/Conclusions

We used a previously-developed spatially-explicit model of pollination service to answer three interrelated questions: 1) for an individual grower, what is the combination of crop and pollinator-providing natural habitat that maximizes profit?, 2) How does this combination change as a function of the crop’s dependence on native pollinators (i.e. the landscape)? and 3) how would we expect landscape to change if other growers making independent decisions were also part of the landscape?  We found that although we can engineer an optimal landscape for a single individual, individual decision-making with multiple individuals leads to tragedy of the pollination commons, in which the individual growers, acting in their own best interests, create a sub-optimal landscape.  Much like watershed management that uses our quantitative understanding of hydrology, cooperative management, using our understanding of pollination, can provide guidance on policies necessary to avoid tragic, sub-optimal landscapes.