The Natural Capital Project is working on a 2-year, $1.9 million program to develop a marine decision support tool with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services Tradeoffs) will be used to assess ecosystem services in a marine environment along the Pacific Coast.

The InVEST modeling tool runs as a number of scripts in the ArcGIS ArcToolBox environment with the Spatial Analyst extension. The current InVEST tool includes models for carbon sequestration, pollination of crops, managed timber production, water pollution regulation and sediment retention for reservoir maintenance. It also includes a biodiversity model so that comparisons and tradeoffs between biodiversity and ecosystem services can be analyzed. The next release of InVEST will include models for ecosystem services, including flood mitigation, agriculture production, irrigation, open access harvest and hydropower production. One can assume that future releases will also include tools to assess the contributions of the marine environment, and coastal challenges.

The Pacific Marine Analysis and Research Association (PacMARA) is an organization that hopes to host the development of the marine decision support tool. PacMARA is dedicated to multi-disciplinary ecosystem-based research along the coast of British Columbia. Among the group’s activities was the development of the Marxan Good Practices Handbook, an acclaimed marine spatial planning tool.

It’s thrilling to see this holistic ecosystem management idea being put into place with a robust toolset to collect, analyze and understand the complexities or Earth systems.

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