Ecosystems have different capacities to supply ecosystem services. A plantation forest might be ideal for supply of timber but the supply of habitats for wildlife may be poor. The ForES team has published research showing how accounts of ecosystem capacity to supply ecosystem services can be incorporated into standard Ecosystem Accounts. Here our post-doc Francesco Martini explains more...
The System of Environmental Economic Accounting - Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) is a spatially explicit statistical framework to standardise reporting of the ‘flows’ of ecosystem services, alongside the extent and condition of ‘stocks’ of ecosystems. The condition of an ecosystem asset is calculated by comparing a range of selected characteristics, representative of the condition of ecosystems (e.g. soil quality, number of species, density of trees) to what can be considered a “natural” state, usually referred to a pristine condition free of human interventions. The ecosystem service accounts then illustrate the range of services that are provided by the ecosystem.
Building on the SEEA EA guidelines to develop condition accounts for forest sites, the ForES team proposed a methodology to create an ecosystem capacity index and related capacity accounts (see Figure 1 above). As a result, capacity scores are assigned to each ecosystem asset (i.e., an area of a certain ecosystem type), each corresponding to the capacity to supply a different ecosystem service.
This methodology attempts to bridge the gap between condition and services accounts in the SEEA EA. The capacity accounts could also be more useful to land managers compared to condition accounts, because they can show potential supply of different ecosystem services given the current values of selected variables. For example, a Sitka spruce plantation would likely have low values of condition (compared to a “natural” state, which would already be complex to establish for a country like Ireland, but this is a different story), yet it would still be able to supply valuable services, such as timber provisioning and climate regulation. The capacity accounts could assist reassessment of management objectives in circumstances where there may be a mismatch between ecosystem capacity and management goals in terms of delivery of ecosystem services.
Read more in the full article in the Ecological Indicators journal: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2024.112731 by Francesco Martini, Kathleen Conroy, Emma King, Catherine A. Farrell, Mary Kelly-Quinn, Carl Obst, Yvonne M. Buckley, Jane C. Stout
The ForES project is funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s Competitive Research Funding Programme.
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