Marine ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide have declined dramatically over the last century. In principle, assessing ecosystem services and highlighting their value can help balancing marine conservation and socio-economic goals in environmental decision making. However, in particular for deep-sea ecosystem services many research gaps remain due to methodological challenges involved in their assessment. This thesis advances the research field by assessing economic non-market and non-use values of coastal and deep-sea biodiversity. Stated preference methods were applied along with a Delphi-based expert assessment. In the first choice experiment, participants were willing to pay between £70 and £77 annually for scenarios protecting deep-sea organisms and for medicinal products from deep-sea areas, an environment that participants were mostly unfamiliar with. The second stated preference survey with experienced marine users estimated a stewardship willingness to pay between £8.83 and £8.29 as one-off payments to protect marine sites from degradation. User-preferences were influenced by a broad range of marine habitats, accessibility and the presence of iconic species. The economic value of protected sites decreased when recreational users were excluded. In the third case study, an ecological method − the Ecosystem Principles Approach − was able to alleviate some uncertainties in submarine canyon ecosystem functioning. Ecosystem principles were developed that described spatial, temporal and causal links between processes, such as transportation processes, and important ecosystem services in submarine canyons. The stated preference case studies provide evidence for the less tangible economic trade-offs in protecting marine areas and partly answer the question of how ecosystem services can be assessed using economic tools to inform marine management priorities. The Ecosystem Principles Approach can help us to understand better how to move towards such management priorities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:665354 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Jobstvogt, Niels |
| Publisher | University of Aberdeen |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=227216 |
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