Connecting stakeholder priorities and desired environmental attributes for wetland restoration using ecosystem services and a heat map analysis for communications.

Framing ecological restoration and monitoring goals from a human benefits perspective (i.e., ecosystem services) can help inform restoration planners, surrounding communities, and relevant stakeholders about the direct benefits they may obtain from a specific restoration project. We used a case study of tidal wetland restoration in the Tillamook River watershed in Oregon, USA, to demonstrate how to identify and integrate community stakeholders/beneficiaries and the environmental attributes they use to inform the design of and enhance environmental benefits from ecological restoration. Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) Scoping Tool, we quantify the types of ecosystem services of greatest common value to stakeholders/beneficiaries that lead to desired benefits that contribute to their well-being in the context of planned uses that can be incorporated into the restoration project. This case study identified priority stakeholders, beneficiaries, and environmental attributes of interest to inform restoration goal selection. This novel decision context application of the FEGS Scoping Tool also included an effort focused on how to communicate the connections between stakeholders, and the environmental attributes of greatest interest to them using heat maps.

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.

Synthesis of Two Decades of US EPA's Ecosystem Services Research to Inform Environmental, Community, and Sustainability Decision Making.

A conceptual framework is helpful to understand what types of ecosystem services (ES) information is needed to support decision making. Principles of structured decision making are helpful for articulating how ES consideration can influence different elements in a given decision context resulting in changes to the environment, human health, and well-being. This article presents a holistic view of an ES framework, summarizing two decades of the US EPA's ES research, including recent advances in final ES, those ES that provide benefits directly to people. Approximately 150 peer-reviewed publications, technical reports, and book chapters characterize a large ES research portfolio. In introducing framework elements and the suite of relevant US EPA research for each element, both challenges and opportunities are identified. Lessons from research to advance each of the final ES elements can be useful for identifying gaps and future science needs. Ultimately, the goal of this article is to help the reader develop an operational understanding of the final ES conceptual framework, an understanding of the state of science for a number of ES elements, and an introduction to some ES tools, models, and frameworks that may be of use in their case-study applications or decision-making contexts.

Integrated stakeholder prioritization criteria for environmental management.

It is widely recognized that stakeholder engagement can lead to improved decision making. However, decision makers must identify and engage appropriate stakeholder groups. This can be challenging when there is a wide and diverse range of potential stakeholders, often the case in environmental management. Some fields, business and public relations for example, have proposed criteria or methodologies for prioritizing stakeholders for inclusion in decision making, but current methods of stakeholder evaluation in environmental management focus on stakeholder identification, categorization, and relationship analysis, none of which explicitly prioritize stakeholders. In this paper we propose a set of ten criteria, drawn from the literature, that can be used to prioritize stakeholders for environmental management decision making. These criteria are: level of interest, level of influence, magnitude of impact, probability of impact, urgency/temporal immediacy, proximity, economic interest, rights, fairness, and underrepresented/underserved populations. Not all criteria will be relevant to all decision makers, but we suggest this set of criteria encompasses those stakeholder engagement factors most commonly considered by decision makers. This paper proposes these criteria that form the basis of future decision support approaches in environmental management contexts and we argue for development and testing of these criteria to connect stakeholder prioritization and environmental decision making.

The ecosystem service of property protection and exposure to environmental stressors in the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmental stressors such as sea-level rise, erosion, and increased storm frequency and intensity are exposing coastal properties to greater amounts of damage. Coastal habitats like beaches, dunes, seagrasses, and wetlands can help reduce exposure and property damage. Using InVEST's Coastal Vulnerability Model, an exposure index value was calculated for every 250 m2 segment along the coastline in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties in Florida, USA. Nineteen sea level-by-habitat management scenarios were evaluated for a suite of shoreline segments across multiple exposures that can be used to inform local decision making as part of larger strategies for coastal management. Overall, a rise in sea level and degradation of coastal habitats could decrease the number of lower exposed shoreline segments and increase the number of higher exposed shoreline segments. These results were used to identify changes in the amount of potential residential property damage among different scenarios. Under high sea levels, additional protection to coastal habitats could reduce the amount of residential property damage resulting from one tropical cyclone event by $50.4 million (2018 US dollars (USD)) (by the year 2050) and by $71.8 million (2018 USD) (by the year 2100) in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties. This research demonstrates the effects that habitat type/abundance and sea-level rise could have on vulnerable coastlines. The results of the modeled scenarios can be incorporated into several recent community resiliency planning initiatives in the region to develop more robust management plans and preparations for a changing environment.