Evaluating opportunities to enhance ecosystem services in public use areas

• Published in: Ecosystem services 2014-03, Vol.7, p.167-176
• Main Authors: Villamagna, Amy M., Angermeier, Paul L., Niazi, Nicholas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Conservation intent; Cultural services; Ecosystem service capacity; Public use areas; Regulating services
• ISSN: 2212-0416; 2212-0416
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2013.09.002

Public use and conservation areas (PUAs) offer opportunities to protect and enhance the delivery of ecosystem services (ES), however ES are rarely evaluated on such lands. We developed a spatially-explicit method for estimating regulating and cultural service capacity and evaluating intent to conserve ES in PUAs. We use management priority information to infer conservation intent and demonstrate the application of a social capacity metric for assessing cultural service capacity. We present a decision framework to guide efforts to enhance the delivery of benefits to public land users and downstream residents. We test this approach by pairing analyses of two ecosystem services—water purification and recreational bird watching-in PUAs throughout the Albemarle–Pamlico basin (Virginia and North Carolina). Our results reveal that management of the majority of sites does not currently give priority to either service, despite a wide range of service capacities. The decision framework suggests that managers of PUAs with moderate to high service capacity could protect ES flow by increasing awareness and other social capacity factors within PUAs. In contrast, managers of PUAs with low service capacity but high potential to influence local and regional environmental condition might focus on enhancing the biophysical capacity to provide selected services. •Public use and conservation areas (PUAs) offer ample opportunities to protect and enhance vital ecosystem services.•Regulating and cultural ecosystem services, like water purification and bird watching, are complementary services that can be enhanced by a shared suite of management efforts within public use areas.•The intent to conserve ecosystem services within public use areas can be assessed by means of the management priority given to the service or features and processes that create the service.•Comparing conservation intent and capacity of ecosystem services can provide guidance for public use area management aimed at protecting and enhancing ecosystem service delivery.•Comparing riparian filtration potential, the influence a PUA may have on local or regional water quality, to expected riparian filtration, inferred from land cover, can help identify PUAs where riparian zone enhancements will have the greatest impact.