Intro
The Situation
Currently there are numerous indicator initiatives that focus on measuring progress for a particular management program or policy driver, but there are few indicators that simply demonstrate the status and trends of key ecosystem services upon which humans rely.
The Project
MOP is identifying the benefits that ocean stakeholders most care about and will develop methods to measure and communicate the status of these ecosystem services, including developing simple and compelling visual representations.
Role in Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning
Ecosystem services are the benefits that natural resources and processes provide to humans. They articulate the linkage between human economies, societies and the environment. EBM aims to ensure that these benefits are available to humans by understanding the processes that create them, the values humans place on them, and by developing management goals that ensure they are appropriately used and conserved to support human systems. Indicators of ecosystem services will measure progress towards these goals by simply communicating the status of the benefits that stakeholders want and need. All aspects of CMSP are required to accomplish this including a thorough understanding of physical, biological, economic, and social sciences; sharing and accessibility of data; tools to model and measure tradeoffs between services; and means for communicating to different audiences.
Challenges & Applications
The challenges to effective utilization for Ecosystem Service Indicators are numerous and include: Defining ecosystem services, understanding what people care about, data availability, developing methods to link current data collection efforts to defined ecosystem services, developing tools to communicate with different audiences, etc. The development of these indicators will be broadly applicable, including potential use by policy makers, educational institutions, and other ecosystem based management programs.
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Ecosystem Service Indicators are used to measure and communicate changes in marine resources that ultimately affect the ocean-dependent goods and services humans need. |
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