Our Impact: Guidebook Facilitates Ecosystem Services Assessment

A few years ago, the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and a handful of other federal agencies began exploring methods to robustly evaluate how natural resource management choices affect things people care about and to clearly communicate those connections to the public. Ecosystem services assessment offers an answer if communication, consistency and capacity issues among practitioners need to be resolved. In the third installment of our 12-part series highlighting the environmental policy impacts of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions over its first decade, we describe our leadership in the development of an online guidebook that provides a framework and methodology to bridge the gap between concept and practice, helping federal agencies advance the use of ecosystem services approaches to planning and management where desired.