Translating Data into Services: Defining Ecological Production Functions to Advance Natural Capital Assessments
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Scientists and policy makers recognize the important services and benefits provided to humans and society from natural resources. Much work to date has focused on developing frameworks, concepts, and strategies to incorporate ecosystem services into decision making. This investment in conceptual planning has paid off, and today governments, financial institutions, non-governmental organizations, and businesses recognize the imperative to include nature-based solutions in their plans to secure essential ecological services and benefits in the face of changing climate and the resulting increased risks to societies and economies. Quantification of net ecosystem service gains is commonly undertaken in association with remediation or restoration activities following a chemical release; however, as the global community focuses on investing in nature-based solutions, reliable, relevant, and repeatable approaches for quantifying ecosystem service gains are needed to support decision making and reporting to relevant stakeholders, which include regulatory agencies, financial institutions, and the public. In order to quantify these service gains, data related to services derived from nature is translated from measurement endpoints to ecosystem services provided using ecological production functions (EPFs). Widespread application of nature-based projects and quantification of service gains could benefit from development and dissemination of EPFs to inform assessment and reporting. Ecosystem services accounting has been undertaken in many environments and using many different data sources for years. This platform session will assemble case studies demonstrating the translation of data measurement endpoints to quantification of ecosystem services through ecological production functions for a variety of habitats and services. Presentations on data sources and their relevance to ecosystem service calculations are also welcome. The goal of this session is to discuss what ecological production functions have worked, what has not worked, and whether there is an opportunity to streamline some types of ecosystem service calculations using commonly available data to advance global sustainability and climate reporting efforts.