1. Assessment of Ecosystem Services & Biodiversity
Alberta Innovates – Bio Solutions Information Session
Edmonton, November 27, 2013
It’s Our Nature to Know
Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute

2. Early days
Few people
Lots of land & water
Fewer limits to growth

3. Water filtration & storage
Abundant ecosystem services
Crop production
Forage production
Wood production
Provisioning
Carbon storage
CO2
Pollination
Water filtration & storage
Regulating
Inspiration
Recreation
Cultural
Replace Peregrine photo: Bison?
Key ecosystem services in Alberta

4. Modern era More people Little unallocated land & water More land uses
Replace Jasper Ave photo

5. Time to take stock Growing population Finite land base
Modern environmental challenges
Growing population
Finite land base
Multiple land uses
Social license to operate
Engaged consumers

6. Time to take stock State-of-the-environment Changes over time
Modern knowledge requirements
State-of-the-environment
Changes over time
Consistent across Alberta
Reliable

7. Part of the Roadmap Assessment of ecosystem services & biodiversity
Information management
Market design

8. Reviewing our options Traditional approaches Transformational systems
Static inventories
Limited field verification
Proprietary
Dynamic monitoring systems
Investment in new data
Open access

9. ABMI Consistent since 2007 Core mandate is monitoring
Not-for-profit corporation
Board includes gov’t & non-gov’t
Province-wide database of biodiversity data, development & land cover
Build on traditional inventory & monitoring approaches
Incorporate new technology

10. ABMI Application Centre
Demonstrate relevance to environmental management
Information products from raw data
Identify & fill (some) gaps
Dedicated business unit (2011)
Projects
Oil sands monitoring
Climate change adaptation
Assessment of ecosystem services & biodiversity
Ecological recovery after reclamation
Raw data
Scientific knowledge
Information products

11. Assessment of Ecosystem Services & Biodiversity
Build from biodiversity core
Increase user base
Leverage ABMI brand
Independent governance
Credible science
Open access mandate
Provincial scope

12. How we got here…. Riparian assessment protocols for ES Payments
2013
2012
Review of ecosystem service assessment examples
Economic evaluation of conservation offsets
2011
IAFE report on ecosystem service assessment
2010
Policy support for market-based instruments
2008
2009
Province-wide environmental monitoring system
2007

13. Project Goals Map ecosystem services & biodiversity
Timber
Forage
Water purification
Carbon
Pollination
Biodiversity
Demonstrate environmental management applications
Stewardship reporting
Market-based instruments
Regional / watershed planning

14. Collaborators

15. Mapping Alberta’s Ecosystem Services
Carbon storage
Water purification
Pollination
Timber production
Rangeland forage production
Biodiversity
This is being done for multiple ecosystem services across Alberta; Maps of all of these services will help us understand where trade-offs among services exist.
We are using data like…
Landcover – Carbon
Waterbodies, elevation – Water Purification
Canola field & bee habitat – Pollination
Forest cover – Timber
Grassland & Pasture – Forage Production
Biodiversity Intactness

16. Example: Water Purification
Track water flow using DEM
Water picks up sediment based on landcover/ land-use
Track sediment deposition
Determine important upslope source areas for points of interest (e.g. cities, recreational lakes)
Water flow model, based on digital elevation model. Water rains down based on precipitation data, flows downhill.
Sediment generation (erosion) is based on universal soil loss equation, influenced by landcover (i.e. ABMI HF and veg maps)
Sediment is deposited as water continues to move downstream
Pick points of interest (in this case, Edmonton) and you can trace the upslope areas where sediment came from (i.e. where you want to target management). In the zoomed-in map, darker red = places supplying Edmonton with more sediment.

17. Ecosystem Service Trade-offs
When maps & models have been developed, it will help us understand trade-offs between the provision of different services on a given parcel of land.
Foley et al Science 309:570

18. Ecosystem Service Scorecards
ES provision for specific regions or industries
Marketing of natural resource products
Biodiversity
Timber
Forage
Water purification
Carbon
Pollination
Goal of all applications is to provide an economic incentive for stewardship & conservation. ES scorecards can be used as a form of environmental reporting.

19. MBI`s - Conservation Offsets
Link land management to changes in ES
ES info can be incorporated into conservation offsets; i.e. mandating that developers compensate for ecological elements lost through developing land. Usually done for things like wetlands, endangered species habitat, fish habitat (DFO), but could also be done for ES. First step is understanding how much a given development (e.g. new well-site, gravel pit, road, subdivision) decreases ES, and how much conservation actions (e.g. BMPs, restoration) increase ES.

20. Scenario Modelling
Future ES provision under potential land-use policies
Payment for ecosystem services (PES)
Conservation offsets
Carbon tax/cap & trade
Use completed models to predict how ES (and socioeconomic indicators) respond through time under different policies. Example map of predicted songbird intactness under business-as-usual oil sands rollout in the Lower Athabasca.

21. Opportunity Province-wide maps of ecosystem services & biodiversity
Improve Alberta’s environment by enabling new ways to pay for conservation & reclamation
Province-wide maps of ecosystem services & biodiversity
Open source models
(Mostly) publicly available inputs
Beta release March 2014
Demonstrate applications to environmental management
Stewardship reporting
Market-based instruments
Regional / watershed planning

22. Thank You Find us online at www.abmi.ca Images abmi.ca arkive.org
wikipedia.org