The table below describes different ways that NESP and partners have used ESCMs in forest systems. Each is linked to a short use case, describing a context in which that use has occurred.
These use cases were developed from work with the Ashley National Forest planning team, which is described in more detail in this paper.
| ESCMs can... | Link |
|---|---|
| Facilitate a shared understanding of ecosystem services. Building and working with these models can help managers and researchers move beyond examining ecological outcomes of habitat management to mapping out impacts to people and what they care about. By clearly illustrating connections between different ecological and social aspects of a system, these models can help spur thinking about the variety of partners and expertise needed to fully understand the impacts that a particular management action or external driver will have. | |
| Jump-start ecosystem services and/or socio-economic metric selection. Since ESCMs help to identify the full suite of socio-economic outcomes linked to an intervention, they are a useful starting place for selecting common metrics that would allow for easier comparison between ecosystem services outcomes of different projects. | |
| Specify and highlight cultural services. Cultural ecosystem services, or the intangible benefits that nature provides to people, are often the most significant services that an ecosystem provides. But because these services are difficult to measure, they are often ignored in decision-making. Using an ESCM to explicitly define how aspects of culture will be affected by a changing ecosystem can bring these services more deliberately into a management or decision-making context. |