Ecosystem services and natural capital are essential components of human welfare, particularly amongst resource-dependent communities in Africa. However, valuing and visualizing ecosystem services in ways that are appropriate for decision-making has proven difficult. Although mapping is a popular approach, it often relies on proxies (e.g. land use) that might not be representative of actual ecosystem services, and/or carry significant error due to spatial misalignments, which makes them inappropriate for local-scale decision-making. With the emergence of the socio-cultural ES paradigm, and a shift towards participatory methodologies, an updated review of ecosystem service mapping is needed to compare approaches and identify a way forward. In this study we conduct a systematic literature review of ecosystem service mapping in Africa, and compare outcomes of mapping approaches (e.g. economic, biophysical, socio-cultural). Specifically, we ask: (1) what valuation methods have been used to map ES in Africa; (2) what scales and spatial resolutions are most often applied to ES mapping; and (3) what proxies are used to quantify ecosystem services? Ultimately, our goal is draw on lessons from the literature to begin to develop a standardized approach for mapping ecosystem services in a way that is valuable to communities, and useful for local decision-making.
Results/Conclusions
Our preliminary results reveal that economic and biophysical approaches are most often used by researchers to map ecosystem services. However, despite their small number (n=2), socio-cultural ecosystem service valuations and mapping capture a significantly more broad range of services when compared to other valuation and mapping methods. For instance, on average, socio-cultural approaches identify and map 18 different ecosystem services, while biophysical and economic approaches average six and four services, respectively. Additionally, socio-cultural mapping approaches apply participatory methodologies, so mapped services are known to be valuable/useful to communities. These results support our own socio-cultural assessment, which identifies 18 local-scale ecosystem services that are highly valued by stakeholders. Despite the utility of socio-cultural approaches, mapping them for use in decision-making remains a challenge. To address this, we present a conceptual model to map socio-cultural ecosystem services. This model requires that researchers study the social and spatial contexts of a system to engage, classify, spatialize, and map ecosystem services at local-scales using high-spatial resolution data. This approach is designed to include communities in the mapping process, and reduce errors associated with coarse resolution mapping, which will theoretically strengthen decision-making.