Dataset Information

Complementarity in the provision of ecosystem services reduces the cost of mitigating amplified natural disturbance events.

ABSTRACT: Climate change has been implicated as a root cause of the recent surge in natural disturbance events such as storms, wildfires, and insect outbreaks. This climate-based surge has led to a greater focus on disturbance-mitigating benefits of ecosystem management. Quantifying these benefits requires knowledge of the relationship between natural and anthropogenic disturbances, which is lacking at the temporal and spatial scales needed to inform ecosystem-based management. This study investigates a specific relationship between timber harvesting and climate-amplified outbreaks of mountain pine beetle. If harvesting is located to mitigate long-distance insect dispersal, there is potential for a win-win outcome in which both timber production and forest conservation can be increased. This spatially targeted harvesting strategy lowers the cost of providing disturbance-mitigating ecosystem services, because valuable timber products are also produced. Mitigating long-distance dispersal also produces net gains in forest conservation across various stakeholder groups. These results speak to ongoing federal efforts to encourage forest vegetation removal on public forestlands to improve forest health. These efforts will lower the cost of responding to climate-amplified natural disturbance events but only if vegetation removal efforts are spatially located to reduce disturbance risk. Otherwise, efforts to improve forest health may be converting forest conservation services to timber services.

SUBMITTER: Sims C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4250140 | biostudies-other | 2014 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Complementarity in the provision of ecosystem services reduces the cost of mitigating amplified natural disturbance events.

Sims Charles C Aadland David D Powell James J Finnoff David C DC Crabb Ben B

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20141110 47

Climate change has been implicated as a root cause of the recent surge in natural disturbance events such as storms, wildfires, and insect outbreaks. This climate-based surge has led to a greater focus on disturbance-mitigating benefits of ecosystem management. Quantifying these benefits requires knowledge of the relationship between natural and anthropogenic disturbances, which is lacking at the temporal and spatial scales needed to inform ecosystem-based management. This study investigates a s ...[more]

PMID: 25385604

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Project description:In many parts of the world forest disturbance regimes have intensified recently, and future climatic changes are expected to amplify this development further in the coming decades. These changes are increasingly challenging the main objectives of forest ecosystem management, which are to provide ecosystem services sustainably to society and maintain the biological diversity of forests. Yet a comprehensive understanding of how disturbances affect these primary goals of ecosystem management is still lacking. We conducted a global literature review on the impact of three of the most important disturbance agents (fire, wind, and bark beetles) on 13 different ecosystem services and three indicators of biodiversity in forests of the boreal, cool- and warm-temperate biomes. Our objectives were to (i) synthesize the effect of natural disturbances on a wide range of possible objectives of forest management, and (ii) investigate standardized effect sizes of disturbance for selected indicators via a quantitative meta-analysis. We screened a total of 1958 disturbance studies published between 1981 and 2013, and reviewed 478 in detail. We first investigated the overall effect of disturbances on individual ecosystem services and indicators of biodiversity by means of independence tests, and subsequently examined the effect size of disturbances on indicators of carbon storage and biodiversity by means of regression analysis. Additionally, we investigated the effect of commonly used approaches of disturbance management, i.e. salvage logging and prescribed burning. We found that disturbance impacts on ecosystem services are generally negative, an effect that was supported for all categories of ecosystem services, i.e. supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services (P < 0.001). Indicators of biodiversity, i.e. species richness, habitat quality and diversity indices, on the other hand were found to be influenced positively by disturbance (P < 0.001). Our analyses thus reveal a 'disturbance paradox', documenting that disturbances can put ecosystem services at risk while simultaneously facilitating biodiversity. A detailed investigation of disturbance effect sizes on carbon storage and biodiversity further underlined these divergent effects of disturbance. While a disturbance event on average causes a decrease in total ecosystem carbon by 38.5% (standardized coefficient for stand-replacing disturbance), it on average increases overall species richness by 35.6%. Disturbance-management approaches such as salvage logging and prescribed burning were neither found significantly to mitigate negative effects on ecosystem services nor to enhance positive effects on biodiversity, and thus were not found to alleviate the disturbance paradox. Considering that climate change is expected to intensify natural disturbance regimes, our results indicate that biodiversity will generally benefit from such changes while a sustainable provisioning of ecosystem services might come increasingly under pressure. This underlines that disturbance risk and resilience require increased attention in ecosystem management in the future, and that new approaches to addressing the disturbance paradox in management are needed.

Project description:Many voluntary incentive programs for provision of forest ecosystem services (ES) have low participation rates, insufficient enrollment areas, and inefficient ecological outcomes. Understanding participation behavior in such programs has therefore become a crucial part of policy success. We synthesized a large body of literature on the behavior of nonindustrial private forest owners based on surveys of stated (intended) participation or data on actual participation in existing or hypothetical programs. Using metaregression analysis, we examined how methodological, program-characteristic, and economic-incentive variables affected participation rate estimates. Participation rates tended to be overestimated when landowner participation was elicited in hypothetical choice situations (compared with real situations) and when dichotomous choice surveys (compared with census data) were used. The marginal effect sizes were quite large, for example, a 31% increase with use of stated choices in hypothetical scenarios, and practitioners should therefore be aware of them. However, use of choice experiment surveys in a modified scenario based on existing programs had no effect on participation when all other determinants were controlled for. Participation rates decreased significantly as length of the contract increased and when there was no withdrawal option. These results suggest that perpetual contracts have a lower negative impact on participation than time-limited contracts with a duration of over 50 years. We confirmed that as compensation amounts increased, participation increased. One-time up-front payments were more effective in increasing initial participation than annual payments for contracts of over 5 years. We identified the robust determinants and the effect sizes of those determinants on landowner participation rate estimates, thereby contributing to a better understanding of forest owner behavior and offering useful insights to enable researchers and resource managers to improve the design and efficiency of new and existing forest ES programs.

Dataset Information

Complementarity in the provision of ecosystem services reduces the cost of mitigating amplified natural disturbance events.

Publications

Complementarity in the provision of ecosystem services reduces the cost of mitigating amplified natural disturbance events.

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