Putting people in ecosystem service models

Background/Question/Methods

Our lives, economies, and societies are fundamentally part of, and co-dependent on, natural systems and landscapes. Models that estimate how ecosystems and landscapes produce “services” that can be used by human populations highlight the ways in which human-dominated systems depend on natural capital and the flow of ecosystem services. Such ecosystem service models typically use land use and land cover data to estimate the flow of some potential service that may be available from a landscape. These models have become more adept at handling ecological complexity and in some case moving beyond land cover data, but have not systematically integrated people or communities. Which communities use what kind of ecosystem services? How much do they use? Which populations are vulnerable to ecosystem service change? Answering such questions requires that generalizable ecosystem models must also have a way to generalize models for how the flow of some service is captured or used by people.

Results/Conclusions

We develop integrated social and ecosystem service models for two ecosystem services, pollination and recreation, estimated at the national scale for Canada. To develop these integrated models, we first introduce the concept of an ecosystem ‘serviceshed’, which is defined as the area of the landscape from which a specific community draws a specific service. Using communities’ servicesheds, along with data from the Canadian Census of Agriculture, the Canadian Census of Population and the General Social Survey, we summarize populations that utilize these services and the landscapes upon which they depend. We provide spatial graphical descriptions of population characteristics and their landscape dependences for all of Canada. Our results show which areas of the country provide the most value to human populations, as well as the populations that are most vulnerable to landscape changes.