![[logo] US EPA](../gif/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
Forecasting and assessing ecological and community health
AED research quantifies the benefits and value of ecosystem services, such as water filtration, flood regulation, and food production. This helps communities factor in the implications of losing those services and the costs of replacing crucial ecosystem functions that support viable economies and human health and well-being.
Project: Ecosystem Goods and Services Production and Benefit Functions (EGSPF)
Research task: Uncertainty, scalability, and transferability of ecosystem goods and services
This project is developing a multi-scalar, integrated Emergy Systems Model of the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) and conducting an emergy analysis of various aspects of this system. The model includes four scales of system organization with appropriate questions addressed at each scale. The coral reef scale of ecosystems investigates the relationship between reef attributes and how they are coupled to economic activities. The island watershed scale investigates the relationship between water quality standards and human well-being. At the single island scale, the socioeconomic development and the historical roots of present conditions are explored; and at the scale of the USVI as a US territory the sustainability of the system is evaluated using an emergy approach.
AED Task Lead: Dan Campbell
Research task: To develop and test environmental accounting methods using emergy to quantify environmental debt and assets on a unified balance sheet and income statement.
This research focuses on developing a quantitative method to determine the sustainability of any human enterprise by developing a complete set of emergy and money accounts that are reconciled through establishing the emergy equivalent of the human services for which money is received. This has been a decade long project that is focused on an evaluation of the USEPA , ORD, NHEERL’s Atlantic Ecology Division as a case study through which these methods can be demonstrated.
AED Task Lead: Dan Campbell
Project: Community-Based Ecosystem Goods and Services Research for Representative Communities
Research task: An integrated study of sustainability in Puerto Rico at multiple spatial scales
AED is leading an interagency, cross-disciplinary decision science and valuation team to characterize communities in the Guánica Bay watershed, evaluate decision choices and processes, develop effective processes to engage those communities in collaborative research, guide development of decision tools to make them responsive to users’ needs and broadly accessible to all types of decision-makers, communities and individuals, and finally, quantify the production and valuation of ecosystem goods and services for sustainable communities in the Guánica Bay watershed, and more broadly in Puerto Rico. Guidance and training modules are being developed to transfer the methods to other coastal communities.
AED Task Lead: Pat Bradley
Project: Place-based and Thematic Ecosystem Goods and Services Research
Research task: Understanding the provisioning of ecosystem services provided by wetlands and their use in sustainable land and water management.
In this project there are two components to AED’s wetland research. The first relates to a better understanding of the factors affecting salt-marsh dependent birds, and the second to the development of a tool to help quantify ecosystem benefits and services from freshwater wetlands. Both of these efforts seek to provide support to help inform wetland management decisions using data that are obtained with minimal field effort.
AED Task Lead: Walter Berry