Elsevier

Ocean & Coastal Management

Volume 153, 1 March 2018, Pages 168-175
Ocean & Coastal Management

Ecosystem services' mapping in data-poor coastal areas: Which are the monitoring priorities?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2017.11.021Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Monitoring priorities for ecosystem services (ESS) mapping in data-poor coastal areas are explored.

  • The mapping method is based on ESS providing, benefiting and connecting areas.

  • Habitat mapping emerges as a key monitoring priority for marine and coastal ESS′ mapping.

  • Mapping ESS benefiting and connecting areas can be kept simple in data-poor conditions.

  • An aggregated ESS mapping method can be advisable for a first-tier assessment.

Abstract

A crucial goal of ecosystem-based management is to maintain the delivery of ecosystem services (ESS) over time. This requires ESS to be assessed repeatedly over time, a task that becomes extremely challenging in data-poor coastal areas, where the lack of data and resources sums up with the intrinsic difficulties of assessing marine and coastal ESS. This implies the need to develop simple ESS assessment methods and to optimize the monitoring effort required to implement them. The aim of this work is to identify which are the key monitoring priorities for ESS mapping in data-poor coastal areas, in the perspective of ecosystem-based management implementation. In order to do so, the ESS provided by Posidonia oceanica meadows in the northern African Mediterranean coastal area have been chosen as a case study, and assessed by mapping the service providing, benefiting and connecting areas. Different input data and methods have been tested to explore how the mapping approach can be kept as simple as possible to ensure a broad applicability, and which are the crucial data required, in order to optimize the monitoring effort. The spatial distribution of the habitat providing the ESS resulted to be the data to which the mapping outcomes are more sensitive, and should be thus considered a key monitoring priority. The other input data can be kept as simple as (1) an expert-driven estimate of the service connecting area, to be understood as an ecologically meaningful range of influence of the focal habitat, and (2) globally available datasets for mapping the service benefiting areas. Overall, this results in an aggregated mapping of the multiple ESS provided by a marine habitat, which, according to our results, seems to be an advisable strategy for a first ESS assessment suitable for application in a data-poor context.

Introduction

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) shifts the perspective from a sectoral to an integrated approach to management, in which humans are considered as integral parts of the ecosystem (Agardy et al., 2011, McLeod et al., 2005, UNEP/GPA, 2006). A core focus of EBM is the maintenance of ecosystem structures, processes and functioning, so that the long term delivery of ecosystem services (ESS) to humans is secured (Agardy et al., 2011, McLeod et al., 2005). ESS is thus a central concept in EBM implementation, as it explicitly connects the ecosystems, and their functioning, with human beneficiaries. This connection is underlined by the concepts of ESS supply and demand (Burkhard et al., 2012), which emphasize that the potential to supply ESS, based on the functioning of the ecosystem, is converted into ESS only if there is a demand for these services from society (Burkhard et al., 2014).

ESS mapping, and particularly mapping of ESS supply and demand, are increasingly used in ESS assessments (Burkhard et al., 2012, Kroll et al., 2012, Nedkov and Burkhard, 2012, Sturck et al., 2014, Wolff et al., 2015), because of their usefulness for an effective planning (Andrew et al., 2015). On these regards, the concepts of “service providing area” (SPA), i.e. the spatial units where the service is sourced, and “service benefiting area” (SBA), i.e. the spatial units where the service is needed or readily used or consumed, allow to frame ESS supply and demand in a spatial dimension (Fisher et al., 2009, Serna-Chavez et al., 2014, Syrbe and Walz, 2012). In general, ESS are provided where the supply meets the demand, however, SPA and SBA do not necessarily need to overlap in order to have the actual ESS provision, as the ESS provision is not restricted to the area of the SPA and ESS can reach beneficiaries located also outside of it. In operational terms, this has led to the conceptualization of the “service connecting area” (SCA) (Serna-Chavez et al., 2014, Syrbe and Walz, 2012), which spatially represents a sort of connecting area through which the ESS can flow from the SPA to the SBA if the two do not overlap (see Costanza, 2008, Fisher et al., 2009 for a classification of the possible spatial relationships between SPA and SBA).

If marine and coastal areas are considered, however, data and methods for ESS assessment are much more limited compared to terrestrial systems, and consequently, a gap in literature exists concerning marine and coastal ESS (Liquete et al., 2013). Reasons include, among others, the lack of knowledge about marine habitats' coverage, the complexity of assessing connectivity between habitats, and the difficulty in identifying clear boundaries and assessment units in maritime areas (Liquete et al., 2013). In the case of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica, for example, although being the most widespread and a rather well-studied seagrass species in the Mediterranean sea, the knowledge about the meadows’ spatial distribution is patchy and characterized by mismatching assessment methods and spatial scales (Zucchetta et al., 2016). This makes the description of coverage and temporal trends at broad spatial scales quite challenging, and it is reflected in a knowledge about the ESS provided that mainly concerns specific case studies and a limited set of ESS (Campagne et al., 2014, Nordlund et al., 2016). On the other side, however, the recent directives (UNEP/MAP, 2012) engaged countries in the framework of the ecological status assessment and the consequent improvement of it, when needed. All these call for an increase of management capabilities and implies the decision on where to concentrate the effort and limited available resources. ESS mapping plays an important role in bringing ecosystems and their functioning to the attention of decision makers, highlighting their capacity to support human well-being and contributing to focus management efforts on the ecosystems whose ESS provision is critically decreasing. In data-poor coastal areas, where less research facilities and in situ data are available, the gap could become even larger, making the study of marine and coastal ESS even more challenging, in the perspective of an effective application of EBM and gaining of the Good Ecological Status.

In this context, the present study aims to identify the monitoring priorities for ESS mapping in the perspective of application of EBM in data-poor coastal areas. The ESS, indeed, represent good indicators being easily comprehensible also by policy makers and managers called to decide how to invest limited resources in environmental programs. In order to explore these aspects, the ESS provided by the P. oceanica meadows in the northern African Mediterranean coastal area have been chosen as a case study, being the seagrass meadows an example of submerged habitat for which ESS are still understudied, and the Southern Mediterranean coasts a data-poor area for which, to our knowledge, no scientific literature on ESS is available as yet. The mapping procedure has been repeated using different data and methods, in order to (1) check how the area of ESS provision vary in response to different inputs, and (2) compare the case in which ESS are resolved in an aggregated way (presence/absence of one or more ESS) with the case in which ESS are resolved one by one, including, in the latter case, the effect of applying different weights to different ESS within a simple benefit transfer exercise. The results have been used to explore which is the simplest mapping methodology capable to provide a reliable first ESS assessment suitable for application in a data-poor context, and which are the crucial information needed to perform the assessment.

Section snippets

Study area and data availability

The study area covers the North African coastal area located within the Western Mediterranean Sea UNEP-MAP sub region (Garmendia et al., 2015, UNEP/MAP, 2012) (Fig. 1). The area has been subdivided into 6 subzones, using a zonation adapted from Garmendia et al. (2015). Along the coast-to-open-sea direction, coastal areas (CAs) and offshore water bodies (OWBs) are distinguished, the first ones including the land-sea interface from 1 km landward to 1 nm seaward respect to the coastline, and the

Baseline results and sensitivity analysis

The baseline mapping approach (SPA from P. oceanica distribution model, SBA from “screening method”, SCA 1 km wide) results in a ESS area (surface with provision of one or more ESS) of 6307 km2 (Fig. 2).

Concerning the sensitivity analysis, the variation respect to the baseline due to the alternative definitions of SPA and SCA (Table 1) are shown in Fig. 3. A +50% and −50% variation of the SPA's surface area produces a +26% and −36% variation in the ESS area, respectively. Concerning the SCA, a

Discussion

One of the crucial goals of EBM is to maintain the provision of ESS over time. This requires that an ESS assessment is performed and, possibly, repeated over time, in order to understand the temporal trend, to implement management actions aimed at maintaining the ESS provision and to evaluate their effectiveness. In data poor areas, lack of data and resources are often limiting the capability to perform such assessments. In Africa, for example, 52 studies concerning ESS have been found (Wangai

Conclusions

This work explores how the mapping of ESS provided by marine and coastal habitats can be simplified in order to be widely applicable in data-poor areas, and which are the resulting monitoring priorities. The recommendations for the managers that emerge can be summarized as follows:

  • A first assessment of the multiple ESS provided by a marine/coastal habitat can be done in an aggregated way, gaining a much easier to apply method respect to a service-by-service assessment, while still obtaining

Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the EU FP7 Collaborative Project MEDINA (Marine Ecosystem Dynamics and Indicators for North Africa, Grant agreement no: 282977; www.medinaproject.eu, http://www.medinageoportal.eu/). We thank the three anonymous reviewers for the constructing comments that improved the manuscript.

References (42)

  • H.M. Serna-Chavez et al.

    A quantitative framework for assessing spatial flows of ecosystem services

    Ecol. Indic.

    (2014)
  • J. Sturck et al.

    Mapping ecosystem services: the supply and demand of flood regulation services in Europe

    Ecol. Indic.

    (2014)
  • R.-U. Syrbe et al.

    Spatial indicators for the assessment of ecosystem services: providing, benefiting and connecting areas and landscape metrics

    Ecol. Indic

    (2012)
  • P.W. Wangai et al.

    A review of studies on ecosystem services in Africa

    Int. J. Sustain. Built Environ.

    (2016)
  • S. Wolff et al.

    Mapping ecosystem services demand: a review of current research and future perspectives

    Ecol. Indic.

    (2015)
  • M. Zucchetta et al.

    Modelling the spatial distribution of the seagrass posidonia oceanica along the North African coast: implications for the assessment of good environmental status

    Ecol. Indic.

    (2016)
  • T. Agardy et al.

    Taking Steps toward Marine and Coastal Management

    (2011)
  • M.E. Andrew et al.

    Spatial data, analysis approaches, and information needs for spatial ecosystem service assessments: a review

    GIScience Remote Sens.

    (2015)
  • J. Borum et al.

    European seagrasses: an introduction to monitoring and management, the M&MS project

  • B. Burkhard et al.

    Ecosystem service potentials, flows and demands – concepts for spatial localisation, indication and quantification

    Landsc

    (2014)
  • C.S. Campagne et al.

    The seagrass Posidonia oceanica: ecosystem services identification and economic evaluation of goods and benefits

    Mar. Pollut. Bull.

    (2014)
  • Cited by (10)

    • Ecosystem service flows: A systematic literature review of marine systems

      2022, Ecosystem Services
      Citation Excerpt :

      i) The 23 publications in which marine ES flow was clearly defined and discerned from the rest of the ES components (e.g., Liquete et al., 2013b, 2016). Most of those used an adapted definition from Syrbe & Walz (2012) to describe ES flows as “the spatial and temporal connections between a service providing area (SPA) and a service benefiting area (SBA) area through a service connecting area (SCA)” (e.g., Rova et al, 2018). Other definitions were those of, e.g., Owuor et al. (2017), who described ES flows as a set of ES currently consumed or used in a particular region.

    • Spatiotemporal tradeoffs and synergies in vegetation vitality and poverty transition in rocky desertification area

      2021, Science of the Total Environment
      Citation Excerpt :

      In this work, we tried to tackle this by selecting the best resolution data and data from official sources. Data availability is one of the most common barriers to developing high-resolution studies (e.g., Shay et al., 2016; Rova et al., 2018; Inacio et al., 2020). The period of analysis was between 2000 and 2015.

    • Ecosystem services as a resilience descriptor in habitat risk assessment using the InVEST model

      2020, Ecological Indicators
      Citation Excerpt :

      This agrees with previous research that shows that sea level rise is one of the most important threats to coastal environments (e.g. Teck et al., 2010; Almeida et al., 2016; Doubleday et al., 2017), affecting mainly estuaries (Boerema and Meire, 2017). Model-based projections advocate an increment of 0.26 to 0.77 m by 2100 for 1.5 °C of global warming (IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), suggesting that areas with elevation lower or equal to 5 m above the sea level have the risk to disappear or to be naturally modified during the next centuries (e.g., Rova et al., 2018). In the Mondego estuary, studies have shown that a sea level rise of 0.50 m would induce a general increase in water depth in the lower areas of the estuary and large flooded areas (Ferreira et al., 2008; Santos et al., 2012).

    • Potential of Earth Observation (EO) technologies for seagrass ecosystem service assessments

      2019, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation
      Citation Excerpt :

      Data availability may also results in complete evaluation of a seagrass ecosystem (Campagne et al., 2015) at high spatial and temporal resolution with the Landsat. Expert driven estimated data may also fill-in the local data gaps (Rova et al., 2018), but regional ES assessments rely on availability of processed products. Lack of technical expertise in processing RS data and handling specialized software to analyze those data is sometimes considered as a cause of data unavailability.

    • Expert-based and correlative models to map habitat quality: Which gives better support to conservation planning?

      2018, Global Ecology and Conservation
      Citation Excerpt :

      Indeed, the possibility to obtain cost-effective and reliable spatially –explicit information on HQ, and more generally on ES, is particularly relevant to identify optimal scenarios of habitat protection and restoration (e.g., Crossman and Bryan, 2009; Lehtomäki and Moilanen, 2013). This need is crucial in data-poor and multiple stakeholders' demands contexts (e.g., coastal areas; Rova et al., 2018), where approaches like systematic conservation planning (Lehtomäki and Moilanen, 2013) can offer a viable support in the decision-making arena, even facilitating stakeholders' engagement and active participation as well as trade-offs analysis among multiple ES (Lin et al., 2017; Pandeya et al., 2016). InVEST represents a comprehensive and flexible decision support tool not limited to conservation planning, but, broadly, to landscape policy and planning (Sallustio et al., 2017).

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text