The Marine Team of the Natural Capital Project began a 2-year program to develop a suite of spatially-explicit ecosystem service models- the marine InVEST tool, and to apply the tool to a specific policy question in the British Columbia or California coastal marine ecosystem. The Natural Capital Project's mission is to improve how humankind uses the world's lands and waters by making clear the economic and lifesustaining services they provide. The vision of this project is to use the framework of ecosystem services to inform ecosystem-based management of marine and coastal waters. Mapping and modeling ecosystem service flows and their changes under alternative management scenarios can elucidate the true costs and benefits of natural resource management options and can lead to decision-making with improved outcomes for both humans and the ecosystems on which we depend. The primary outcome goal is the development, validation, and field application of the marine InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) tool for ecosystem services scenario assessment. The tool will be highly flexible to accommodate application across multiple scales in coastal and marine regions with diverse habitats, policy questions, and stakeholders. To ensure maximum flexibility, the tool will be modular such that ecosystem services are modeled individually, and models will be tiered "simple or complex" depending on the questions asked and the availability of data.
InVEST is designed for use as part of an active decision making process. The first phase involves working with decision makers and other stakeholders to identify critical management decisions and to develop scenarios of how an area might look under future management options, climate change or population growth. Based on these scenarios, a modular set of models quantifies and maps ecosystem services in a flexible way. The outputs of these models provide decision makers with maps and other information about costs, benefits, tradeoffs, and synergies of alternative investments in land and seascapes.
InVEST models run as script tools in the ArcGIS ArcToolBox environment. To run InVEST, you must have ArcGIS 9.2 (at least service pack 2.) ArcGIS 9.3 is not currently fully supported. You will also need an ArcInfo level license to run one of the hydrology modules. Spatial Analyst extension should be installed and activated on your computer. In addition, you must have Python 2.4 or higher, which is typically installed automatically as part of ArcGIS. Running InVEST effectively does not require knowledge of Python programming, but it does require basic to intermediate skills in ArcGIS. InVEST 1.0 includes models for carbon sequestration, pollination of crops, managed timber production, water pollution regulation and sediment retention for reservoir maintenance. It also includes a biodiversity model so that comparisons and tradeoffs between biodiversity and ecosystem services can be analyzed. The next release of InVEST will include a suite of new ecosystem services: flood mitigation, agriculture production, irrigation, open access harvest and hydropower production. The tool is modular in the sense that you do not have to model all the ecosystem services listed, but rather can select only those of interest.
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