Tidal barrages could contribute to mitigating climate change, but their deployment is not without potential welfare costs attributable to the degradation of ecosystem services. Economic valuation of natural resources provides a common metric for quantifying the disparate costs and benefits of barrage construction in a way that provides transparency when trade-offs are considered. However, very little is currently known about the value of environmental impacts associated with tidal barrages. Using the Taw Torridge estuary in North Devon as a case study, this research proposes an Environmental Benefits Assessment methodology that supports application of the ecosystem services concept to local environmental impact appraisal, and facilitates economic valuation. This methodology is novel in that it evaluates benefits, as opposed to services, and considers a comprehensive suite of benefits in a single assessment: an approach rarely attempted in practice, but essential if ecosystem services approaches are to fully support resource management needs. The subsequent empirical valuation uses stated preference techniques to examine the different ways people use and value the estuary ecosystem, determine how strongly they rank different costs and benefits of tidal barrages, and elicit willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce the habitat loss resulting from a tidal barrage development. The study provides the first empirical valuation of UK estuarine mudflats, but makes a further contribution to the environmental economics discipline by deploying both contingent valuation and choice experiment methods. Additionally, a novel application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to examine the consistency of WTP with expressed preferences for habitat protection in relation to other barrage attributes. The alternative stated preference techniques result in comparable WTP values and the importance attached to habitat loss (as measured by the AHP) is strongly associated with WTP and also with its scope sensitivity, indicating that WTP is largely driven by environmental preferences.

This project explores the potential for integrating an ecosystem service approach with the Central Texas Greenprint for Growth process, a continuing and active stakeholder supported voluntary conservation effort The report provides an overview of the Greenprint process, ecosystem services, and the participatory stakeholder method of social network analysis or mapping. Each of these methods may be used to explore opportunities to enhance the collaborative land conservation planning activity in Central Texas. Conservation goals identified in the Greenprint process are evaluated in terms of ecosystem service and methods for measuring more complete environmental value can be identified. This evaluation focuses on three out of the six goals that the stakeholders have identified as having importance: protect water quality and quantity, preserve farms and ranchlands, and protect cultural resources. Community-based environmental planning or adaptive management processes such as the Greenprint process requires effective communication methods to address complex issues among diverse stakeholders. Social network mapping and analysis are illustrated as a method to evaluate how stakeholders communicate information about ecosystem services. A limited social network analysis is conducted as a pilot study with a stakeholder group in Bastrop, Texas. Natural resource professionals have used social network analysis to understand the structure of relationships and the pathways of communication in community planning processes. I will review this method and its potential for application. Through questionnaires, data gathered at a stakeholder meeting and is used to develop a preliminary social network matrix to demonstrate the method. It is envisioned that the report would advance understanding of how an ecosystem service approach can enhance an active ecological planning process and landscape scale conservation. / text

The main goal of this practicum is to explore the issues of ecosystem services associated with a commercial parking lot in a temperate climatic condition. The site chosen was in Sydney, Australia. The intention of the design is to examine how ecosystem services can be engaged to reduce carbon emission; improve air and water quality; reduce stormwater runoff; mitigate temperature fluctuations; increase biodiversity and enhance human comfort and delight.

Magister Scientiae (Biodiversity and Conservation Biology) - MSc (Biodiv and Cons Biol) / Natural resources play important roles in ecosystem service delivery, more especially in rural households where livelihoods depend heavily on natural resources for the delivery of ecosystem services. The various benefits derived from provisioning, supporting, regulating and cultural services of natural ecosystems such as food, medicines, carbon sequestration, spiritual fulfilment all support human life and sustain its well-being. Research on valuation of natural resources suggest that the values derived mainly from non-marketed natural resources are insignificant and thus, not reflected in national accounts. Economic valuations have traditionally been concerned with the quantification of direct use values of ecosystem services that are marketed to produce tangible benefits. The scope of natural resource valuations have, however been broadened by scientists in recent years to consider passive or non-use values to reflect the total economic values of natural resources and ecosystem services to societies. In this study, I valued the streams of ecosystem services derived from natural resources in Leliefontein communal rangeland; an area of 192 000 hectares in the semi-arid region of Namaqualand in South Africa. Rangeland forage for livestock, medicinal plants, fuelwood, and water resources from the Communal Area were valuated for one production year between January and December 2012. Valuation was done to incorporate both marketed and non-marketed natural resources which were used within the production year. The total economic value for the area was estimated at R20 156 672 per annum. Value of rangeland forage was estimated at R61.92 ha-1 yr-1, fuelwood’s value was estimated at R25.04 ha-1 yr-1, value of medicinal plants was R2.26 ha-1 yr-1 and water resources valued at R9.45 ha-1 yr-1. The non-use value was estimated by eliciting the willingness to pay for the conservation of the natural resources using a contingent valuation method. Economic value of natural resources in Leliefontein increased to R105 per hectare from R99 when non-use value was added to reflect the total economic value of ecosystem services in the area. Household income level positively correlated with individual’s willingness to pay for ecosystem services. I recommend that decision making should take into account the socio-economic conditions of a community when determining the total economic value of ecosystem services. Non-use value of the ecosystems should be considered especially in rural areas where people depend on the natural environment for livelihoods and socio-cultural well-being. Sustainable and equitable utilisation of natural resources for the purpose of maintaining a sustainable flow of critical ecosystem services should form the basis for formulating policies on land use and sustainable development.

The term Ecosystem Services describes all the direct and indirect contributions ecosystems have on human welfare. Fresh water, clean air, genetic diversity, recreation and inspiration are some examples of ecosystem services we get from nature but often take for granted. The human way of living affects our ecosystem and by transforming natural surfaces to unnatural surfaces important ecosystem and their services might be lost or hard to reconstruct. There is a growing support from the community that the value of ecosystem services should be integrated into decision-making in our society.   Gällivare municipality plans for a big infrastructure investment. By knowing which ecosystem services that are important for people living in the city of Gällivare, the municipality can take the ecosystem services into consideration and optimize and reach multifunctionality in natural surfaces providing important ecosystem services. As a part of Gällivare municipality’s work to integrate ecosystem services in their infrastructure investment, this thesis studies ecosystem services during different seasons in the city of Gällivare. This master thesis examines ecosystem services in four different places in Gällivare. An assessment of important ecosystem services in every place was done based on information during a workshop with Gällivare municipality. Eleven or twelve ecosystem services in every place were considered especially important for the municipality. The prioritized ecosystem services were the cultural and the regulating services. How people in the locality experience the cultural services, recreation, mental & physical health; aesthetic appreciation, inspiration & education; tourism and spiritual experience & "sense of place" and what they think of the services' potential development in the future were further studied with a questionnaire and interviews. The regulating ecosystem service local climate regulation was further studied by calculations of the ability of vegetation and water to affect the local temperature. The ability of ecosystems to clean storm water and regulate water flows was studied by inspecting flood maps for the city of Gällivare and standard levels of pollutions in storm water from different land uses.  Early in the study it was found that, during the winter season, existing ecosystem services are mostly cultural services since the ecosystem is in rest during winter and thereby can't deliver the same diversity of services as in summer. During summer season, results showed that vegetation could affect local climate by stabilizing the temperature. The vegetation also delays water flows, which is important during spring when there is a large amount of melt water and during heavy raining. The amount of pollutions in surface water is also reduced by vegetation.

This research is concerned with advancing understanding of human-nature relationships and the ways in which people benefit from interactions with nature. This is important since economic accounts of the value of natural resources are most often used to determine priorities for action, leaving the more deep-felt and intangible ways that people experience and value nature largely excluded from decision making processes. The imperative to understand the more nuanced ways that people benefit from and value nature has gained traction in recent years most notably through high-profile analysis of natural resources which have made explicit their links to human well-being. This study aims to capture these wider values of the Jurassic Coast, Dorset and the ways in which it comes to resonate as significant and valuable to people. It uses both quantitative and qualitative techniques to gain rich insights into what this World Heritage Site really means to visitors and how experiences here underpin psychological well-being. A methodological innovation is presented in the human needs framework which is used to test the extent to which human needs thought to be important for psychological well-being are satisfied through interactions in the landscape. Moreover, it is hypothesised that this satisfaction leads to eudaimonic well-being which is concerned with positive psychological functioning and ‘flourishing’ (Ryan & Deci, 2001). This research has implications for tourism planning and management to ensure opportunities are created or maintained for human needs to be met in the landscape and for optimal visitor experiences to result. More widely, this research also has implications for understanding environmental value from a broad perspective and for using innovative methodologies to reveal these values, and to incorporate them in decision making processes in diverse policy areas.

Agricultural areas represent around 40% of the earth surface and provide a variety of products and services essential to human societies. However, with policy reforms, market liberalisation and climate change issues, continuous land use and cover change (LUCC) brings uncertainty in the quantity and quality of ecosystem services supplied for the future generations. The processes of LUCC have been explored using top-down approaches at global and regional level but more recent methods have focused on agents’ interactions at smaller scale. This approach is better suited to understanding and modelling complex socio-ecological systems, which emerge from individual actions, and therefore for developing tools which improve policy effectiveness. In recent years, there has also been increasing interest in gaining more detailed understanding of the impacts of LUCC on the range of ecosystem services associated with different landscapes and farming practices. The objectives of this thesis are: 1/ to understand and model the internal processes of LUCC at local scale, i.e. farmer behaviour, 2/ to explore heterogeneous farmer decision making and the impacts it has on LUCC and on ecosystem services and 3/ to inform policy makers for improving the effectiveness of land-related policies. This thesis presents an agent-based modelling framework which integrates psycho-social models of heterogeneous farmer decisions and an ecological model of skylark breeding population. The model is applied to the Lunan, a small Scottish arable catchment, and is empirically-grounded using social surveys, i.e. phone interviews and choice-based conjoint experiments. Based on ecological attitudes and farming goals, three main types of farmer agents were generated: profit-oriented, multifunctionalist, traditionalist. The proportion of farmer types found within the survey was used to scale-up respondent results to the agent population, spatially distributed within a GIS-based representation of the catchment. Under three socio-economic scenarios, based on the IPCC-SRES framework, the three types of farmers maximise an utility function, which is disaggregated into economic, environmental and social preferences, and apply the farm strategy (i.e. land uses, management style, agri-environmental measures) that best satisfies them. Each type of agents demonstrates different reactions to market and policy pressures though farmers seem to be constrained by lack of financial opportunities and are therefore unable to fully comply with environmental and social goals. At the landscape level, the impacts on ecosystem services, in particular the skylark local population, depend strongly on policy objectives, which can be antagonist and create trade-offs in the provision of different services, and on farmer socio-environmental values. A set of policy recommendations is offered that encompasses the heterogeneity of farmer decision-making with the aim of meeting sustainable targets. Finally, further improvements of the conceptual and methodological framework are discussed.

Protected areas (PAs) are considered a key strategy to ensure the in situ persistence of biodiversity and the ecosystem services (ES) that this provides. The coverage of PAs has exponentially expanded in the last 25 years, and they now account for approximately 13% of the Earth's surface. Alongside this expansion, PA research literature has also increased seeking to identify and assess the main factors that influence the effectiveness of PAs in sheltering biodiversity and ES from anthropogenic pressures. Spatial distribution, spatial design, management strategy and threats, have been widely acknowledged as key factors. However, despite significant progress, several aspects of these factors remain poorly explored. This thesis aims to identify and address some of the gaps, which I detail below. The second chapter contributes to understanding of how the distribution of PAs affects the representation of biodiversity and ES. To this end, the Chilean PA system was used as a case study as this has never been previously assessed in terms of ES. I found that the strong bias in Chilean PAs distribution toward southern areas, which contain mainly ice and bare rock, hampers the PA system in achieving effective representativeness. The third and fourth chapters address some gaps in PA spatial design. The third assesses for the first time the spatial design of the global PA system and provides new methodologies to achieve this at such a large scale. Focusing on the size, shape, level of fragmentation, occurrence of buffer zones and proximity to the closest PA, I demonstrate that PAs tend to be small, irregularly shaped and fragmented. However, they are often close to one another and generally have buffer zones. Using the methodology generated on third chapter, I explicitly test in the fourth chapter the combined and interactive effects of PA spatial features on their ability to represent biodiversity, which has never been tested before. Using South America as a model for study I show that the spatial design largely explains biodiversity representation and that the interaction between spatial features affects the latter. The fifth chapter focuses on threats to PAs, assessing the extent to which metal mining activities represent an actual conflict with the global PA system. Evidence suggests that the global terrestrial PA system has been effective at displacing metal mining activities from within its bounds. However, given the high proportion of mines found in the close surroundings of PAs, and the distances over which mining activities can have influences, it is highly likely that the conservation performance of a significant proportion of PAs is being affected. So far I have demonstrated that PAs are not always optimally distributed and they can compete with other land uses, which can undermine their functionality. In this regard, in the final analytical chapter I explore how using spatial conservation prioritization (SCP) tools it is possible to optimize the representation of conservation features by minimizing competition with other land uses. Specifically, I assess the consequences for biodiversity and ES representation of incorporating land use trade-offs in SCP analyses. I show that the dichotomist decision of treating a land use as a trade-off or not can have enormous consequences on biodiversity and ES representation, and the implications of such decisions have to be considered before policy recommendations. This thesis shows that distribution, spatial design and threats play an important role in PA representativeness, and that SCP techniques can make a significant contribution to balancing biodiversity and ES conservation with human activities, when trade-offs are treated comprehensively. Finally, I discuss the importance of prioritising the interactions between, rather than just individual effects of, factors in order to optimise PA effectiveness and the distribution of scarce conservation resources.

The concept of ecosystem services often is defined as a way where we as humans protect and preserve available ecosystems and at the same time can make use of these ecosystems for our own well-being. According to the UN report Millennium Ecosystem Assessment from 2005 the services can be classified into four categories: provisioning, regulating, cultural or supporting. This study is focusing on how Swedish municipalities are managing all of these services. The main aim was to examine if there is a difference among municipalities in general and between municipalities with a high and a low range of population density in particular. The reason for these potential differences was also discussed by interviews with representatives for a number of selected municipalities, complemented by studies of literature, this study showed that there are differences between Sweden’s more populated and less populated municipalities. Typically, the main difference was found in the area of the knowledge and the use of the concept in daily planning. Some municipalities seems to be almost unaware of that they partly already are planning for the maintenance of these services. In conclusion, there is still more work to do fully make use of the ecosystem service concept in planning to create a more resilient society, not least for the municipalities on the country side!

Intensive agriculture has led to an increase in production; however this has often coincided with a decline in the provision of other Ecosystem Services (ES). ES affected include those regulated by soil chemical, physical and biological properties such as biodiversity provision and the regulation of nutrient cycling, water quality and rates of greenhouse gas emissions. A growing awareness of the value of nonproduction ES to human health and wellbeing has encouraged the funding of agrienvironment schemes in the UK, through which farmers receive funding to alter management practices to increase the provision of certain ES. One particular management change encouraged through agricultural payments is the creation of species rich grassland (SRG) on former intensively managed (IM) arable or grassland sites. Under these schemes farmers are required to carry out an extensification of management practices by reducing or ceasing fertiliser application, grazing and cultivation, or removing the existing crop or sward and sowing a specified seed mix of desired grassland species. Despite the commitment of substantial sums of money and land to extensification schemes, there has been little research into the extent to which they enhance provision of multiple ES and the potential for the legacy of intensive agriculture to limit ES provision and greatly reduce the value of extensification. This study aimed to: 1) compare soil properties between sites remaining under intensive management and those that had undergone extensification; 2) relate soil properties to; fluxes of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O), plant diversity, soil microbial diversity and concentrations of nutrients in leachate from intensively and extensively managed sites in order to determine potential benefits of extensification. Paired field plots were established on working farms in south east Scotland and at Rothamsted Research North Wyke in south west England. Each of the four plot pairs in Scotland consisted of a newly created SRG on former arable land and an adjacent IM plot. The SRG plots ranged in age from 3 to nine years old in 2010. Soil samples were collected from the Scottish sites twice yearly in 2010 and 2011, alongside regular measurements of N2O fluxes from soil and assessment of plant diversity. At North Wyke four replicated SRG plots, forming part of an existing experiment on former intensive grassland, were each paired with an IM plot. Soil samples were analysed for their chemical and physical properties and for the concentration of certain phospholipid derived fatty acids (PLFA) biomarkers to compare the composition and size of the soil microbial community. Soil N2O fluxes and the nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentrations of soil water samples measured in 2010 and 2011. Results from more intensive N2O flux measurements, conducted in 2012, were compared to model output from the UK-DNDC model to assess its potential for predicting changes in N2O emissions following extensification. No significant difference was found in any soil chemical or physical properties between paired IM and SRG plots in Scotland, although soil bulk density tended to be lower in the older SRG plots relative to the paired IM plots. Nitrous oxide emissions were low from all plots with only an occasional emissions peak being recorded and overall there was no significant effect of management intensity on soil N2O fluxes. The UK-DNDC model outputs were generally of a similar order of magnitude but poorly correlated with measured N2O fluxes and soil water and available N content. Botanical diversity was enhanced in the SRGs compared to the IM plots, though plant species were mostly of low conservation value and indicative of a high nutrient environment and the diversity of the SRG plots was low, compared to long-established semi-natural grassland elsewhere in Europe. Total soil PLFA concentration was significantly higher in the IM plots but the fungal concentration and the ratio of Gram positive:Gram negative bacteria were no greater in the SRG, suggesting it had begun to resemble long-term unimproved grassland. Despite limited success at obtaining soil water samples, at North Wyke concentrations of mineral N in soil water were lower from the SRG plots than the IM plots, although there were no consistent differences in total P or organic N concentrations, organic N contributed over 80% of the total N in soil water samples from the SRG plots. This study has shown that the legacy of intensive agriculture continues to affect soil properties for at least 10 years following extensification. The results suggest that the potential for newly created SRGs to provide enhanced ES’ could be limited and may not justify the reduction in productivity and the financial input associated with shortterm extensification schemes.