Ecosystem Service Valuation Evidence Map
Creators: name: Brown, Christina Estela
name: Kirk, Tammy
name: Tanner, Sophia
name: Sigman, Jesse
name: Ritchie, Stephanie Mary
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
subject: Agriculture
subject: Life Sciences
subject: Environmental Sciences
subject: Natural Resources Management and Policy
subject: Water Resource Management
subject: Natural Resource Economics
subject: Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
subject: Forest Sciences
subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
subject: Agriculture Evidence Map
subject: Agriculture Evidence Synthesis
subject: Ecosystem Valuation

description: In addition to the food and fiber that U.S. farms produce, a wide suite of environmental benefits flow from the agricultural and forested landscape. These benefits are often referred to as ecosystem services, and they include clean water, clear air, soil health, and thriving wildlife communities. There is an increasing need for better quantifying the ecosystem service benefits of agricultural conservation. The USDA spends $6 billion per year on conservation programs that support producers who adopt agricultural conservation practices and management strategies that provide ecosystem services. Additional producer incentives are available from private sector markets for carbon offsets, water quality offsets, and habitat banking, and, increasingly, sustainable-sourcing programs developed by major commodity purchasers. A renewed Federal effort to create national natural capital accounts (87 FR 24851), which would provide a baseline estimation of the economic value of natural assets, reflects an increased impetus towards assessing the value of ecosystem services. 

 

Balancing the tradeoffs between the different ecosystem services is a challenge when there is limited information and guidance on how best to quantify the economic tradeoffs involved. This project builds on a gap analysis supported by a 2022 Pathways Internship which used metadata on over 5,000 ecosystem service valuation (ESV) studies recorded in the Environmental Valuation Resource Inventory (EVRI) database to identify temporal patterns in the literature across several broad categories of ecosystem services. The gap analysis reveals that in the U.S., more studies examine ecosystem services with high quality, national data sources (e.g., air and water quality), and clear gaps on topics with limited data (e.g., pollination services) . However, more information is needed to prioritize research that improve estimates of the benefit of ecosystem services that flow from conservation programs. 

 

We aim to develop a modified value of information (VOI) approach to provide an empirical estimate of the value of new ESV studies that can be used to estimate benefits of conservation programs and advance ERS’s ability to build a framework through which ESVs can inform evidence-based policy and program management. Incorporating ESV into program management will help to inform the economic trade-offs and the distribution of effects across communities related to policies that alter ecosystem services and will become increasingly important as agencies implement climate smart agriculture policies.