Ecosystem Service Mapping in Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull
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Ecosystem Service Mapping in Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull 11 August 2016 Rob Dunford, Alison Smith, Berta Martín-López, Pam Berry, Louise Martland and Paula Harrison Warwickshire Participatory GIS Report 2 Prepared under contract from the European Commission Contract n° 308428 Collaborative project FP7 Environment Project acronym: OpenNESS Project full title: Operationalisation of natural capital and ecosystem services: from concepts to real-world applications Start of the project: 01 December 2012 Duration: 54 months Project coordinator: Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) Project website http://www.openness-project.eu Citation: Dunford, R.W., Smith, A.C., Martín-López, B., Berry, P.M., Martland, L. and Harrison, P.A. (2016) Ecosystem service mapping in Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull, OpenNESS project report, European Commission FP7. Contents 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 3 2 Preliminary steps: prioritisation WC&S ecosystem services .............................................................. 4 3 Method 1: HBA-Ecosystem Service GIS method ............................................................................... 4 4 Method 2: Participatory Ecosystem Service mapping approach ........................................................ 6 4.1 Aesthetic landscapes ......................................................................................................................... 7 4.2 Recreation ......................................................................................................................................... 9 4.3 Habitat for wildlife ........................................................................................................................... 11 4.4 Flood protection .............................................................................................................................. 14 4.5 Intensive farming ............................................................................................................................. 16 4.6 Traditional crops .............................................................................................................................. 17 5 Method 3: Flickr photo analysis ..................................................................................................... 19 6 Preliminary conclusions and next steps ......................................................................................... 21 2 Warwickshire Participatory GIS Report 3 1 Introduction The concept of ‘ecosystem services’ can be very useful for demonstrating the value of nature to humans, but it is a relatively new concept and has not yet been widely taken up by policy makers, land managers and other stakeholders. The OpenNESS project aims to investigate how this concept can be put into practice in real-life decision-making. As part of this project, the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford is working closely with local stakeholders on two case studies: one in Essex, and this one, covering Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull (WC&S). We have trialled a number of approaches in each area to determine the priority ecosystem services and map their supply and, in some cases, the demand for them. This report summarises the findings of these studies for the WC&S case study. The report presents the following stages of the work: Prioritisation of ecosystem services for WC&S (section 2); Method 1: HBA-Ecosystem Service GIS method: drawing on WC&S’ Habitat and Biodiversity Audit (HBA), and qualitative scoring by local experts to create ecosystem service supply maps (section 3); Method 2: Participatory Ecosystem Service mapping approach: using workshops to map supply and demand of different ecosystem services (section 4); Method 3: Flickr photo analysis (section 5): We have also been investigating the use of Flickr photos to map cultural ecosystem services such as aesthetic beauty within the WC&S area. Conclusions (section 6). Box 1: What are ecosystem services? Ecosystem services are the services that flow from nature and provide benefits for humans. They are usually classified as provisioning, regulating and cultural services. These are all underpinned by supporting services that maintain healthy ecosystems, including provision of habitat for wildlife. Provisioning services provide goods that can be directly consumed by people, e.g. food, timber, water and medicine. Regulating services help to maintain desirable environmental conditions, e.g. by protecting against flooding and soil erosion; regulating the climate (via carbon storage in soils and vegetation); improving air and water quality (pollution removal by vegetation); and providing pollination and biological pest control via beneficial insects, birds and mammals. Cultural services include the supply of aesthetic beauty, recreation opportunities (walking, cycling, boating, fishing etc), local distinctiveness or ‘sense of place’, scientific knowledge and artistic inspiration. 3 Warwickshire Participatory GIS Report 4 2 Preliminary steps: prioritisation of WC&S ecosystem services The OpenNESS project organised an initial workshop in January 2015, with a range of stakeholders including planners, ecologists and agricultural interests. The stakeholders were asked to hold up cards marked “High”, “Medium” and “Low” in response to the question: “In the context of biodiversity offsetting in Warwickshire, what level of priority is the following ecosystem service1”. Twenty ecosystem services were assessed in this way and the final, ordered list, weighted by the number of responses in the high and then medium classes, is shown in Table 1. Table 1. Prioritisation of ecosystem services for WC&S Based on this ranking, in addition to practical constraints on the number of services that could be assessed in the mapping workshop, we chose to focus the mapping exercise on two regulating services (flood protection and wildlife habitat), two cultural services (aesthetic landscapes and recreation) and two provisioning services (traditional and intensive crops). Species habitat was selected over pollination as it was considered to be easier to assess within a workshop. 3 Method 1: HBA-Ecosystem Service GIS method The method presented here was selected to make use of the highly detailed Habitat and Biodiversity Audit data available within the WC&S area. It builds on an approach from the academic literature first presented 1 The initial reason that OPENNESS selected Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull was to focus on the extent to which the Ecosystem Services concept was helpful to the management of biodiversity offsets. However, it became clear that it was first necessary to establish the levels of ecosystem service supply (and, in some cases, demand) within the county and the methods presented here showcased a number of ways to do this. It is also important to note that the question refers to Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull and not just to Warwickshire. 4 Warwickshire Participatory GIS Report 5 in a paper by Benjamin Burkhard2. It is a very simple technique for mapping ecosystem services based on qualitative scoring of the ability of different habitats or land use types (e.g. broad-leaved woodland, arable land or wetland) to supply different ecosystem services and so is ideal for use in combination with the HBA. To customise the approach for WC&S we asked the stakeholders at the January 2015 meeting (i.e. planners, ecologists and agricultural interests) to rank key land use classes from WC&S’s HBA (a highly detailed phase 1 survey of habitats and biodiversity) by answering the question: “What is the capacity of this land use to deliver the following ecosystem service?” Stakeholders classified each land use using a six-class system (i.e. from 0 to 5) where zero is no delivery capacity and 5 is very high delivery capacity. A final summary matrix was created from these results and applied to the Phase 1 GIS layers to present an initial picture of WC&S’s ecosystem service provision (see Table 2). These scores were then applied to the HBA to map land use by ES provision – so that maps of each individual service can be produced and mapped at any scale from the WC&S area down to field/farm-scale resolution of the HBA. Figure 1 exemplifies the output: at the district scale (Warwick District) Table 2. Matrix of qualitative scores for ecosystem service supply from different land use types 2 Burkhard, B., Kroll, F., Nedkov, S. and Müller, F. (2012), Mapping ecosystem service supply, demand and budgets, Ecological Indicators 21: 17–29. 5 Warwickshire Participatory GIS Report 6 Figure 1. Mapping ecosystem services in the Warwick district using a qualitative scoring matrix (the Burkhard approach) Key: ES provision decreases in the order Dark Green (most) > Light Green > Yellow > Orange > Grey (least) 4 Method 2: Participatory Ecosystem Service mapping approach Two participatory mapping workshops were organised on the 3rd and 4th of August, 2015. The first was with local farmers and others with interest in rural land use, and the second was with planners, ecologists, academics and conservation professionals. These groups are referred to as “rural land use participants” and “planners and ecologists” below for simplicity. The aim was to identify at a county scale where the hotspots of ecosystem service supply are now, and where people would like to see them in the future. For each service,