Ecosystem Service-Integrated Assessment Modeling (ES-IAM):

Challenges & research frontiers for cross-scale modeling & data integration

Becky Chaplin-Kramer, Lead Scientist, Natural Capital Project

University of Minnesota and Stanford University

@beckyck rchaplin@umn.edu bchaplin@stanford.edu

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Most important sites (5% of NCP)

Importance to country-level prioritization (across 12 types of NCP)

Critical natural assets

Sites providing 90% of NCP

Natural assets

On land

In the ocean

 DOI: 10.1101/2020.11.08.361014

How much (and where) nature is needed to support human well-being?

39% of natural assets on land provide 90% of value to people

Johnson et al. 2020 https://www.wwf.org.uk/globalfutures

Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator (SEALS)

How (through what policy instruments) can we reach desired futures?

How are global economic drivers’ expected impacts on regional land-use allocations likely to play out in local spatial patterns of land-use change?

• Downscaling coarse changes to finer spatial scales necessary for ecosystem service modeling
• Representing uncertainty of those changes, bounds of realistic futures

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Number of people downstream

What we’ve got:

What we want:

Cost of dredging, reduced reservoir capacity

But where are all the dams, globally?

High resolution imagery and machine-learning to fill gaps in global databases

E.g., for sediment retention

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What we’ve got:

Sediment retained

Retention set by LULC class

What we want:

Retention set by ecosystem function, reflecting long-term feedbacks in ecosystem condition

Percent difference from observed

Categorical (LULC)

Continuous (EVI)

Error: 11.5 t/ha

Error: 5.8 t/ha

Improvement in accuracy of sediment modeling using indices of ecosystem function instead of land-use

Percent difference from observed

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million people

100

Chaplin-Kramer et al. 2019 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw3372

Billions in South Asia and Africa facing increased risk while conditions improve in North Asia and North America

Chi et al. In review. http://beta.povertymaps.net/

Within-country equity mapping: what are the distributions of providers and beneficiaries of ecosystem services?

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