Three recently completed ecosystem restoration studies on the Middle Rio Grande River used Engineering With Nature (EWN) strategies to achieve sustainable development of water resources in the desert, balancing social, environmental and economic considerations using traditional benefit metrics (i.e., habitat units) to support transparent decision making. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has adopted strategic adaptive management approaches to now monitor, evaluate and enhance returns on these investments for the good of the environment and the surrounding community. The culmination of these studies affords a unique opportunity for the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) to assist the USACE Albuquerque District in broadening or extending the base of the benefits generated by these three projects to now include measures of ecosystem goods and services (EGS) that in turn could be used to fine-tune these engineered solutions through adaptive management to enhance ecosystem response and return on these investments. The approach calls for collaborative decision-making with local stakeholders using ecosystem production functions and monetization of these outputs to support transparent decision-making both tactically (short-term) and strategically (long-term).
Results/Conclusions
In this presentation, we will describe how we developed a series of ecosystem production functions and a monetization strategy to characterize the EGS produced by the three studies and discuss how we are integrating these new metrics into the current operation and management paradigm. The intent is to meaningfully characterize the unique ecosystem goods and services (i.e., aquifer recharge, aesthetics, constant stream flow, clean water provisioning, recreation, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, etc.) generated via the effective and efficient operation and management of the system, and help operations move from a focus geared solely towards habitat management to a strategy the focuses on providing a broad array of benefits to the local community.