The Problem with Ecosystem Services

There is a controversy in the conservation community about monetary valuations.  A recent podcast on Freakanomics looked at rational altruism using a Consequentialist cost/benefit analysis.

The example was between treating HIV and malaria.  A person infected with HIV might cost $100,000, while a person dying of malaria might only cost $1,000 to cure.  Since we can help 100 people with malaria for every one with HIV, shouldn't we focus first on malaria, and only turn to HIV once we've helped everyone we can with malaria?

The logic is sound, but try telling that to a doctor working on HIV (let alone a patient with HIV).  But how else could we decide?

The big idea seems to be to add up the (monetary) costs of charities and look at some simple metric (like lives saved) to pick and choose the best charities.(link to bjorn lomberg's thinktank)  But do we only care about a single metric, a single value?  And how compare education to disease, senile dementia to juvenile delinquency?

The same problems bedevil conservation...

I think the simple answer is that there are no simple answers, and every approach has a place.  If some government minister will only listen to economic arguments, use them... but others will listen to other values, and those also matter.  Whether people care about the scariest diseases (terminal diarhea) or the cuddliest endangered animals (link to cockapo), these interests are meaningful.
There is a long tradition in decision science and economics of critiquing irrational human preoccupation with infrequent, but salient/scary crises (link to risk diagram disasters axis) as opposed to rational actors (link to behavioral economics discussion, maybe wikipedia) dispassionately evaluating statistics.  I try to avoid news sources because of our (link) well-demonstrated cognitive biases, but I don't think we can (or should) "fix" every element of human thinking.

Yes, every decision is a choice to focus on one priority over another, and yes it is not rational to make that decision without comparing and ranking all choices.  But pure rationality doesn't take account of the full richness of human life.  We care about many values, not just The Most Important. Is it absurd to try to save endangered species when many people don't have adequate nutrition?  (link to weird conservation stories, nature conservancy).

Wetland, Stream, and Species Mitigation Banks

With the November 3, 2015 Presidential Memorandum "Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment," mitigation banking has been getting more press.

Back in 2008 the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the 2008 Compensatory Mitigation Rule governing compensatory mitigation for activities authorized by Corps permits.  Each division of USACE has published Regional Compensatory Mitigation and Monitoring Guidelines.

Mitigation banks are restoration and conservation sites that preserve, enhance, or create important ecological functions that may be impacted elsewhere.  For example, since 2008 wetland banks can invest in the for-profit creation of new wetlands; developers can purchase credits in the bank to mitigate any impacted wetlands in the same watershed as the proposed development.

There are now over 2000 mitigation banks in the U.S.

USACE  runs the RIBITS website, which is their Regulatory in-lieu fee and bank information tracking system.

This map from RIBITS shows the distribution of mitigation banks in the continental U.S.  Some USAE districts already have dozens to hundreds of banks in operation, whereas some, such as the Albuquerque USACE district, have none.

This figure, courtesy of Kevin Janni, shows the distribution of mitigation banks and HUC watersheds in Texas for the Fort Worth and Galveston USACE districts.  Each bank may only be used to offset development within the same watershed.  Due to differing application processes and timelines for different USACE district, some districts have many more banks than others.

Mitigation banks are evaluated based on the quality of the wetlands created, using rapid assessments such as NMRAM.

The 2016 Mitigation Banking Conference will be held in Texas, May 10-13.

NEPA Impacts Now Require Mitigation

President Obama has recently issued an important new Memorandum directing Federal agencies to employ mitigation banks to offset impacts to natural resources.

The directive re-emphasizes that agencies should seek to avoid any negative environmental impacts first, then minimize impacts, and finally, only seek compensatory offsets for harm that still occurs if necessary.  Within the limits of existing law, agencies should set ‘no net loss’ and ‘net benefit’ goals that apply to more natural resources.   (CEQ Blog Post)

The following analysis of the impacts of this memorandum are from the law office of Holland and Hart:

"We have entered a new regime in federal natural resource management, one that brings to mind Aldo Leopold’s observation that “Conservation . . . is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence or caution.” In time, we will have a better sense of what the new regime will mean in practical terms. For now, the natural resource community will want to focus on the various agencies’ efforts to implement the directives. Across the federal government, for months to come, new rules and policies will be under development with implications for an enormous range of decisions affecting natural resources “that are important, scarce, or sensitive, or wherever doing so is consistent with agency mission and established natural resource objectives.”

These directives deserve considerable attention from those active in the natural resource law and policy arenas. There are new rules of the road for resource agency decisions subject to NEPA review, and they may significantly influence implementation of ESA and other resource protection laws. Federal resource planning efforts will likely change to include substantial consideration of “net gain/no net loss” benchmarks. Most fundamentally, the new directives seem likely to change the transactional environment facing developers seeking federal approvals for: infrastructure projects; energy, water, and mineral development; or other activities potentially impacting federal natural resources.

Agencies’ permitting and compliance decisions involve significant elements of subjectivity and uncertainty. The permitting process is often defined by bargaining over the allocation of risk between an agency wary of potentially unforeseen resource impacts and a developer or resource user wary of potentially unforeseen costs or delays. The Presidential and DOI directives can be seen as ratifying and calling for even greater effort by resource agencies to minimize or eliminate the risk of unforeseen impacts on natural resources. In effect, the agencies are being told to bargain harder, demand greater assurances, and accept little or no risk of adverse impacts when rendering decisions potentially affecting natural resources.

The directives raise the bar, but are not entirely one-sided. They encourage agencies to promote conservation banking, stewardship contracts, and other financial-incentive-based tools that generate “credits” that developers can use to offset adverse impacts of proposed projects. The internal logic of the directives appears to be that the new, higher standards for resource mitigation—net gain, or at least no net loss—are realistically achievable because any project’s unavoidable adverse impacts can be offset with conservation credits.

The agencies’ mandate to bargain harder will create difficulties for almost all resource users. To begin with, baseline resource information often lacks the empirical certainty that would make it obvious how to get to a net gain or no net loss. And what is a “net gain”? How big must that be? More challenging, the directives call for “durability” in mitigation, meaning that the quantitative and qualitative relationship of impact to compensation should endure so long as the impact continues. But natural resources change over time. Even resources that once seemed static are now recognized to be mobile as temperature, precipitation, fire, and other variables change across the landscape. The new directives will particularly frustrate those resource users who are not inclined to anticipate nor internalize within their project planning and business judgments the agencies’ resource management goals. Whatever the agencies were bargaining for yesterday, they’ll soon be bargaining for more.

There is something encouraging here for those resource users who approach the regulatory environment with a transactional mindset. The directives’ embrace of compensatory mitigation means that, once the directives have had time to be incorporated into agency procedures, there should be a predictable regulatory “solution” for a project potentially posing the risk of adverse resource impacts. In theory, the ultimate decision about whether - and on what terms - to approve a permit or other authorization should be somewhat less vulnerable to an agency official’s reluctance to countenance unavoidable adverse resource impacts. This is particularly so if the agencies do, in fact, embrace the use of mitigation banks and other credit-generating tools.

The other potential winners from the directives will be private investors in mitigation banks and similar financial structures that produce resource “credits” to exchange for impacts. 

Juridicational Wetlands

 The Clean Water Act (CWA) regulates all of the "navigable" water bodies in the U.S.  The precise definition of navigable waters is important for specifying what impacts may or may not be allowed to the Waters Of The United States (WOTUS).  However, since the inception of the CWA, numerous Supreme Court cases have challenged the definition of WOTUS.  On May 27, 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issuing a new definition of WOTUS.  While the new definition is already the subject of numerous lawsuits, it is now the new basis of the CWA.

Graphic from SWCA, The Wire.

So what does the new definition say?  Well, it is pretty straight-forward.  There are just 8 possible cases:  

1. traditional navigable waters

2. interstate waters

3. territorial seas

4. impoundments (of 1 - 3 above and 5 below)

5. tributaries

6. adjacent waters

7. five special groups of similarly situated waters

8. case-specific significant nexus waters  

For more information, see this excellent article in SWCA's The Wire.

Top Conservation Stories of 2014

Here are a few of the most important conservation stories from 2014:

--Gila River Proposed Diversion approved by ISC

--Mexican Gray Wolf critical habitat expanded to include most of NM and AZ south of I-40

Zone 1 is where Mexican wolves may be initially released or translocated.  Zone 2 is where Mexican wolves will be allowed to naturally disperse into and occupy, and where Mexican wolves may be translocated.  Zone 3 is where neither initial releases nor translocations will occur, but Mexican wolves will be allowed to disperse into and occupy....where Mexican wolves will be more actively managed...to reduce conflict with the potentially affected public.  However, in AZ east of Highway 87 there will be a "phased approach" to managing wolf populations.

--U.S. Congress Omnibus spending bill approves the Resolution mine landswap in AZ, grazing lease terms expanded to 20 years, and Valles Caldera becomes newest National Park

--Drought in CA (7% snowpack) ... and NM.  (e.g. Heron Lake resevoir levels fall, fail to make San Juan-Chame deliveries to Rio Grande)

-- US EPA and NRCS try to regulate agriculture under CWA....and fail.  The problem of increasing toxic algae problem in Ohio lakes came to a head in 2014 when Cleveland had to turn off their city water intake from Lake Eerie due to a toxic algal bloom. The proposed rule would have allowed EPA to regulate "non-point source" water pollution from farms that did not have a NRCS-approved conservation practices in place.  But apparently the outcry was too much, and early in 2015 the rule was amended.  Note that the final rule, even though it no longer contained this provision, was still vehemently protested in 2015.

--  Gunnison Sage Grouse listed as "Threatened" under the ESA, Colorado appeals.

-- Colorado River Pulse....mostly just grows more tamarisk.

--  Pleistocene megafauna extinction due to meteor impact, new study finds.  

-- Wilderness turns 50 years old

-- New "stacked trait" GMO potatoes and soybeans approved in the U.S.

And a random tidbit:  rabbits eat more forage in utah than bison...leading ranchers to question the state's continued bounty for coyote skins.

A streamlined, GIS version of USDA's Environmental Benefits Index

USDA calculates the environmental benefits of applying conservation easements to farmland.  The University of Minnesota has developed an online tool for mapping three important components used by decision-makers to prioritize farmland conservation funding:

Soil loss is calculated using the Universal Soil Loss Equation, which factors in slope angle and distance, soil texture,

Water quality risk was calculated using a Stream Power Index, and proximity of land parcels to streams.

Habitat quality was calculated using by intersecting known stressors such as roads and development with known areas of high quality habitat, such as areas with endemic or endangered species, high biodiversity, and/or high game abundance.

The combined metric for all three layers generates the Environmental Benefits Index.

Screenshot from maptool from the EBI page of the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota.

Environmental Benefits Assessments for USDA Conservation Reserve Program

The USDA uses an  Environmental Benefits Index (EBI) to rank Conservation Reserve Program land applications by prioritizing soil conservation, water quality, and wildlife habitat.  Six factors are considered:

1. Wildlife habitat benefits resulting from covers on contract acreage 
2. Water quality benefits from reduced erosion, runoff and leaching 
3. On-farm benefits from reduced erosion 
4. Benefits that will likely endure beyond the contract period 
5. Air quality benefits from reduced wind erosion
6. Cost

1.  Wildlife habitat is determined by looking at planting composition (introduced or native), number and composition of species (more species, and more functional groups such as legumes, shrubs, trees, forbs, and grasses have higher value), and landscape context (strips, blocks or mixtures that form corridors or gaps).  Points are also available for providing pollinator habitat and for enhancing wildlife in areas high-priority areas.

2.  Water quality benefits are determined by whether or not the property is in a designated surface water quality impairment zone, the type of soil, potential soil erosion, and distance to major waterbodies.

3.  Not discussed.

4.  Enduring benefits are determined subjectively based on the probability that conservation will continue beyond the CRP contract.  For example, trees would be expected to live longer than the 10-year CRP contract.

5.  Air quality benefits are determined by calculating potential wind erosion (based on average wind speed and soil texture), whether the property is in a air quality nonattainment area, and the potential to sequester carbon in the soil by planting trees, shrubs, or grass.

For more information, see the CRP Farm Science Administration website at USDA.gov.


....USDA also periodically reviews the effectiveness of their programs using the Conservation Effects Assessment Project.  Data and papers can be found here.

Salvage Logging is Not Supported by Published Research

I completed a literature review on the effects of salvage logging (SL). I read all of the major papers, including the two extant literature reviews, the old Forest Service-funded one by McIver and Starr, and the newer one by conservation ecologists Lindemeyer and Noss. The conclusions are consistent: in general, SL increases fire risk, increases erosion, reduces wildlife habitat, and impairs natural recovery. SL has the potential to be much more detrimental than traditional (green) logging (Lindenmeyer and Noss 2006).

This Ponderosa Pine forest burned in a the Las Conchas fire, a stand-replacing crown fire in the summer of 2011.  Two years later, grasses and flowers had recolonized the area.  Cover values were greater than in nearby unburned forests;  forests can recover naturally from even very severe fires.  

 *Increased fire risk:  salvage logging provides the kind of fuels necessary to introduce ground fires into the canopy (Donato 2005). SL increases fuel loads for 20 years compared to controls (McIver and Ottmar 2007).

These burned trees will gradually decay and fall to the forest floor.  Some burned trees may take as much as 50 years to fall, providing valuable wildlife habitat all the while (Lindenmeyer 1997). If they were logged, most of the limbs and crowns would be left as "slash" that, if re-burned, would yield extremely high flame lengths and soil temperatures.

*Increased erosion: salvage logging has the potential to exacerbate erosional problems typically observed in burned watersheds (McIver and Starr 2000).

Natural post-fire erosion can deplete soil, further impairing vegetative recovery.  Human disturbance can compact soils and channelize flow paths, thereby exacerbating natural erosion.  

 *Reduced wildlife habitat:  Most wildlife species rely on dead trees in one way or another.  Of the 102 terrestrial vertebrate species in Washington State, over half (56) require dead tree boles (snags) to nest or den (Hutto 2006). Across the West, 150 species of vertebrates rely on dead trees for nesting or denning (Rose et al 2001).

Less than three months post-fire, bark beetles in the Jemez Mountains, NM were so active they created large piles of sawdust.  Needless to say, woodpeckers were extremely active in this area.

 *Impaired natural vegetation recovery: SL results in increased mortality of pine seedlings (Castro et al 2011).

A pine seedling emerges from the burned forest floor one year after a fire (with a little natural fertilizer thrown in to help).  This seedling would likely be crushed (and the elk dispersed) by salvage logging, necessitating an expensive tree-planting operation to compensate for destroyed natural recruitment and depleted natural fertilizers.

Yes, forest fires are a major natural disturbance to forest ecosystems.  But despite all the talk of unnatural "megafires", even the largest and hottest fires leave some legacy of the previous forest (e.g. burned trees). Logging is also a major disturbance to natural forest ecosystems, a disturbance that burned forests are less resilient to.  Multiple disturbances have cumulative effects on ecosystems, so compounding the damage to a burned forest by removing the remaining trees is much more damaging than logging without fire.

Going forward, there needs to be broader recognition of the ability of ecosystems to recover from natural disturbances and the essential role of biological legacies (in this case, dead burned trees) in the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem processes (Lindenmeyer, Burton, and Franklin, 2008).  Those burned trees are hard at work shepherding the forest back to life, not wasted timber that must be "salvaged".

Current data shows biosphere carbon uptake holding steady

One of the biggest questions for ecosystem scientists is the degree to which terrestrial and marine ecosystems  can continue to sequester carbon in the face of continuing human emissions of CO2 and accompanying global climate change.

This is one of the best (i.e. easiest to interpret) graphs to show that the fraction of emitted CO2 remaining in the atmosphere (i.e. not sequestered) has held steady at around 50% for the last 40+ years (purple line, "Airborne Fraction").  Data Sources: Fossil fuel CO2 emissions - Land use CO2 emissions -  Airborne CO2 levels Graph by Willis Eschenbach.

Similar conclusions were reached by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado last year.

Beaver vs. Climate Change

A new report all about beaver by my friend and chief Forest Ecologist at Wild Earth Guardians, Bryan Bird. The report, Beaver and Climate Change Adaptation in North America (pdf) contains a comprehensive review of beaver ecosystem engineering and derived ecosystem services.

Beaver occur throughout most of North America:

And they can help engineer the environment in ways that could benefit us selfish humans. I can't resist a before-and-after.

BEFORE

AFTER

Economic Incentives and Water Quality in Ohio

Brent Sohngen, a professor in Ohio State University’s Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics, presented “Economic Incentives and Water Quality in Ohio”, an interesting talk about paying farmers for the reductions in runoff pollution they deliver. This economics-inspired approach differs from that typical of Soil and Water Conservation grants that pays for specific installations like riparian buffer strips, containment ponds for sewage, and conservation research program fallow fields.

Dr. Sohngen experimentally signed a contract that would pay farmers for pollution reductions in a small watershed in West Ohio. Unfortunately pollution increased when one of the farmers in the watershed decided to double his hog production. Still, Dr. Sohngen thinks the technique has promise, given that the farmers were responsible for more pollution than a nearby town's wastewater treatment plant. Given what we are willing to pay to upgrade the plant, shouldn't we be willing to pay a similar amount to the farmers?

I like the idea, but the economic logic seems to falter because it is based only on what society is willing to pay, not the cost to the farmer. I would have liked to ask about how much money, given the farmer's decision to invest in additional hogs, it would actually take for the farmer to pollute less. What is the opportunity cost of reduced pollution?

Human Appropriation of NPP

http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/es/hanpp.html

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Global_human_appropriation_of_net_primary_production_(HANPP)

Natural Swimming Pools

Use of chlorine in swimming pools should be counted as the cost of not properly utilizing ecosystem services. Swimming pools can be biologically filtered for cleaner water, happier bathers, and less usage of chlorine.

Unincorporated Kitsap County

"Your discussion of ecological assessment caught my interest, too. Environmental
historians--those practicing in history departments, not science
departments--often pay special attention to the language folks use to describe
nature: "enhanced" or "degraded" for whom? This impulse mostly derives from
historians' understanding of the entwined relationship of colonialism and
science, of which there is a large scholarship. As you might imagine, Native
people could lose out when colonial scientists helped categorize, map, and
explain landscapes in the American West for settlers. Terms like "healthy
landscape" meant healthy for settlers, not Natives. Historians always stress
the human dimension--otherwise we'd never get tenure!"

"But I do see that even twentieth-century language--"enhanced," "degraded"--is
falling by the wayside. What sort of language is cutting edge these days? Any
good references?"

Since restoration is often interdisciplinary, the language we use is sometimes more intuition than institution.

"We define river restoration as assisting the recovery of ecological integrity in a degraded watershed system by reestablishing hydrologic, geomorphic, and ecological processes, and replacing lost, damaged, or compromised biological elements."
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2005WR003985.shtml

What all of this is pointing at is a very intuitive concept: health. There are also various ways and tools for evaluating health. But the general concept of ecosystem health is not really in question any more than is health for the individual human. While there are different systems of medicine (Ayurvedic, Naturopathy, Homeopathy, Osteopathy) they all share core values. Healthy bodies, like healthy ecosystems, are easy to recognize, yet hard to define.

A general definition of health might be linked to integrity, or functionality, productivity (of green biomass, AKA carbon sequestration) or sustainability (of soil and water resources). For example, we look at how an ecosystem provides services: how it adds to life and measurable values that rely on life: water, air, recreation, hunting, resource-production.

The whole gamut of ecosystem services, from pollination to producing oxygen, clean water, and climate control. The recent efforts to attach price tags to these services has the important goal of revaluing natural systems in our capitalist economy. In the past the price of a tree was the sale of a tree, but now we can enumerate the costs in that transaction, the detriment to the salmon run, to clean air and erosion control, to endangered species and multiple-use, sustainability, functionality, productivity, sequestration, elasticity (ability to buffer e.g. climate change)

The notion of ecosystem health in the professional sphere is supported by factor analysis. Perhaps, as in other sciences like Quantum Mechanics, there are only equations: a relationship between numbers and variables. You could as well call the primary factor "oogly-boogly" as "impairment" or "health". But I don't think that is quite right, either. The math is logically constructed to conform to and confirm the consensus in the scientific and resource management community.


That consensus is one of the biggest untold intellectual ideas of the last hundred years: that ecosystems, like people, can be intrinsically healthy or unhealthy. The history of the American conservation movement, from the transcendentalists "preserving" sublime landscapes to environmentalists' campaigns to save the whale, eco 'hot spots' of "diversity" (watch out for that Chimera), and now landscape-level Resource Management, charts the emergence of a unified scientific consensus about what constitutes and is necessary for a healthy ecosystem. Thanks to Science, Technology, and Society scholars such as Kuhn, I needn't argue that we've progressed to a final understanding; there are certainly many technical difficulties in applied ecology/restoration, e.g. measuring "productivity". But I do want to argue that there is a progression; scientists understand ecosystem health in more and better ways than we used to, e.g. new wolf recovery plans take into account advances in theoretical genetics...

Unfortunately, public perception hasn't kept pace with the new consensus in Ecology and our society remains, arguably, the most ecologically illiterate ever. But this gap is understandable when you consider the leaps and bounds that ecology has made in the last 50 years. It is as if, up to about 50 years ago, we lacked the germ-theory of disease and today ecologists are embarked on projects that exceed, in scope and application, the Human Genome Project.

Unfortunately, public perception hasn't kept pace with the new consensus in Ecology and our society remains, arguably, the most ecologically illiterate ever. But this gap is understandable when you consider the leaps and bounds that ecology has made in the last 50 years. It is as if, up to about 50 years ago, we lacked the germ-theory of disease and today ecologists are embarked on projects that exceed, in scope and application, the Human Genome Project.

Maybe a better investigation of these concepts than I can provide would do something to alleviate the profound misunderstandings perpetrated and perpetuated by human ignorance on the Earth. It is as if basic laws of physics, such as gravity, were widely unknown and people routinely attempt to violate them. I say attempt, because, when people "cheat" nature, they always end up loosing. (e.g. : tamarix removal without native replanting fails, plowing windbreaks and conservation reserve grasslands creates dustbowl conditions, fire severity increases even as we spend more and more to control it, etc)
As someone astutely pointed out, sustainability isn't just a value, its a law of of physics (conservation of energy). It seems to be a law of healthy ecosystems, too. I'll let you know more as I figure it out. That factor analysis is especially vexing. I can't tell what their null hypothesis was...this discussion pokes at the undefined underbelly of restoration, which is in its infancy as a professional field. Perhaps that wild west character is why I'm attracted to it. I can work with restoration professionals in the field who are every bit as scientific as scientists in the University's' laboratories, without all the latter's emphasis on paradigm jargon and professional status. I'm sorry I can't think of any sources that focus on defining the concept superstructure of health in ecology and restoration.