Capturing twenty years of change in ecosystem services provided by coastal Massachusetts habitats.

Accounting for ecosystem services across expansive and diverse landscapes presents unique challenges to managers tasked with navigating and synthesizing the social-ecological dynamics of varied stakeholder interests and ecological functions. One approach to this challenge is through expert based matrices that provide valuations for specific service-habitat combinations. In this study, we combine a literature review with local expert input to build an ecosystem service capacity matrix for the Massachusetts Bays National Estuary Partnership (MassBays). We then apply this matrix to a custom conglomerate land cover data set and a habitat connectivity analysis to assess the spatial and temporal dynamics in select ecosystem services of coastal habitats across MassBays from 1996 to 2016. In 1996, saltmarsh was the primary provider of coastal ecosystem services, representing roughly 60% of the total service capacity. More specifically, high elevation saltmarsh was top-ranked, followed by tidal flats, seagrass, low elevation saltmarsh and unclassified saltmarsh. This distribution of service provisioning varied considerably among the five regions of MassBays, reflecting the unique habitat mixes and local expert valuations of each. Although saltmarsh dominated the overall production of services, seagrass and tidal flats drove 97% of the service changes that occurred from one year to the next. From 1996 to 2016, MassBays lost 50% of its seagrass cover and gained 20% more tidal flats, resulting in a 5% overall loss in ecosystem services. Again, this varied among the five regions, with Cape Cod losing as much as 12% of a given service while the Upper North Shore gained 4% in services overall. We bootstrapped the analysis to provide a range of probable outcomes. We also mapped the changes in service production for each of the sixty-eight embayments. This analysis will aid local managers in accounting for ecosystem services as they develop management plans for their represented stakeholders.

Ecosystem Services Profiles for Communities Benefitting from Estuarine Habitats along the Massachusetts Coast, USA.

The Massachusetts Bays National Estuary Partnership is one of 28 programs in the United States Environmental Protection Agency's National Estuary Program (NEP) charged with developing and implementing comprehensive plans for protecting and restoring the biological integrity and beneficial uses of their estuarine systems. The Partnership has recently updated their comprehensive management plan to include restoration targets for coastal habitats, and as part of this effort, the program explored how to better demonstrate that recovery of ecological integrity of degraded ecosystems also provides ecosystem services that humans want and need. An essential step was to identify key stakeholders and understand the benefits important to them. The primary objective of the study presented here was to evaluate variability in beneficial uses of estuarine habitats across coastal communities in Massachusetts Bays. We applied a text mining approach to extract ecosystem services concepts from over 1400 community planning documents. We leveraged a Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) classification framework and related scoping tool to identify and prioritize the suite of natural resource users and ecosystem services those users care about, based on the relative frequency of mentions in documents. Top beneficiaries included residents, experiencers and viewers, property owners, educators and students, and commercial or recreational fishers. Beneficiaries had a surprising degree of shared interests, with top ecosystem services of broad relevance including for naturalness, fish and shellfish, water movement and navigability, water quality and quantity, aesthetic viewscapes, availability of land for development, flood mitigation, and birds. Community-level priorities that emerged were primarily related to regional differences, the local job industry, and local demographics. Identifying priority ecosystem services from community planning documents provides a starting point for setting locally-relevant restoration goals, designing projects that reflect what stakeholders care about, and supporting post-restoration monitoring in terms of accruing relevant benefits to local communities.

Spatially Variable Bioturbation and Physical Mixing Drive the Sedimentary Biogeochemical Seascape in the Louisiana Continental Shelf Hypoxic Zone.

Seasonal hypoxia on the Louisiana continental shelf (LCS) has grown to over 22,000 km2 with limited information available on how low oxygen effects the benthos. Benthic macrofaunal colonization and sediment biogeochemical parameters were characterized at twelve stations in waters 10 - 50 m deep along four transects spanning 320 km across the LCS hypoxic zone in the early fall of 2010 when bottom waters typically return to oxic conditions. Chemical data and sediment profile imaging (SPI) support three primary mechanistic pathways of organic matter degradation on the LCS: (i) metal oxide cycling in depositional muds, (ii) infauna-driven bioturbation delivering oxygen below the sediment-water interface, and (iii) sulfate reduction in sediments where iron oxide availability is limited. The transect nearest the Mississippi River delta had the highest concentrations of porewater and solid phase Mn and Fe with SPI images of recently deposited reddish, mixed muddy sediments suggestive of metal cycling. The deepest stations had high oxidized iron concentrations and rust colored sediments with faunal colonization that suggests sediments are oxidized via bioturbation. Many nearshore and central LCS stations had more black sediments, more disturbed clay layers, lower amounts of oxidized iron, and higher sulfate reduction rates than the deepest stations. Sediment mixing coefficients, DB , determined from chlorophyll-a concentration profiles varied between 33 and 183 cm-2 y-1. DB values were highest at the deepest stations where sediments were colonized. DB were not determined at two nearshore stations where chlorophyll-a concentrations were highly variable in surficial sediments, and on the eastern shelf where sedimentation is high. This study provides a regional view of benthic faunal colonization and sediment biogeochemistry on the LCS, describes regions with potentially different pathways of organic matter degradation, and demonstrates the importance of both bioturbation and physical mixing in processing the large amounts of organic matter in river-dominated continental shelf systems.

A biological condition gradient model for historical assessment of estuarine habitat structure.

Coastal ecosystems are affected by ever-increasing natural and human pressures. Because the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics unique to estuarine ecosystems control the ways that biological resources respond to ecosystem stressors, we present a flexible and adaptable biological assessment method for estuaries. The biological condition gradient (BCG) is a scientific framework of biological response to increasing anthropogenic stress that is comprehensive and ecosystem based and evaluates environmental conditions and the status of ecosystem services in order to identify, communicate, and prioritize management action. Using existing data, we constructed the first estuarine BCG framework that examines changes in habitat structure through time. Working in a New England (U.S.) estuary with a long history of human influence, we developed an approach to define a reference level, which we described as a "minimally disturbed" range of conditions for the ecosystem, anchored by observations before 1850 AD. Like many estuaries in the U.S., the relative importance of environmental stressors changed over time, but even qualitative descriptions of the biological indicators' status provided useful information for defining condition levels. This BCG demonstrated that stressors rarely acted alone and that declines in one biological indicator influenced the declines of others. By documenting the biological responses to cumulative stressors, the BCG inherently suggests an ecosystem-based approach to management. Additionally, the BCG process initiates thinking over long time scales and can be used to inspire scientists, managers, and the public toward environmental action.