Enlisting ecosystem services: A trade-offs analysis on military training land

Background/Question/Methods

The Department of Defense (DoD) manages over 25 million acres of land in the United States of America.  While their primary mission is ensuring the readiness of armed forces, these lands also represent a wide range of natural ecosystems that benefits soldiers, their families, local communities and society in general. Furthermore, they host a disproportionate number of sensitive plant and animal species. The Natural Capital Project is working with the DoD to demonstrate how values and trade-offs of ES on DoD lands can be assessed and mapped using the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) toolset. Working in Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) in Washington State, we have modeled three ecosystem services of interests: timber production, carbon sequestration, and habitat provision for sensitive species. We also developed new ES models to assess training capacity on prairieland. 

Results/Conclusions

We compared a “business-as-usual” scenario and four alternative management scenarios reflecting possible future mission and budget constraints. Our analysis highlighted a complex dynamics between drivers, stressors, and ecosystem services, and portrayed an intricate trade-off between maintaining (or increasing) training and sustainable ecosystem services provisioning. These outcomes are expected to better inform conservation planning and decision-making at JBLM, to achieve the goal of jointly maintaining armed forces readiness and ecosystems sustainability.