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The Integrated Landscape Modeling partnership - Current status and future directions

The Integrated Landscape Modeling (ILM) partnership is an effort by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to identify, evaluate, and develop models to quantify services derived from ecosystems, with a focus on wetland ecosystems and conservation effects. The ILM partnership uses the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) modeling platform to facilitate regional quantifications of ecosystem services under various scenarios of land-cover change that are representative of differing conservation program and practice implementation scenarios. To date, the ILM InVEST partnership has resulted in capabilities to quantify carbon stores, amphibian habitat, plant-community diversity, and pollination services. Work to include waterfowl and grassland bird habitat quality is in progress. Initial InVEST modeling has been focused on the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of the United States; future efforts might encompass other regions as data availability and knowledge increase as to how functions affecting ecosystem services differ among regions. The ILM partnership is also developing the capability for field-scale process-based modeling of depressional wetland ecosystems using the Agricultural Policy/Environmental Extender (APEX) model. Progress was made towards the development of techniques to use the APEX model for closed-basin depressional wetlands of the PPR, in addition to the open systems that the model was originally designed to simulate. The ILM partnership has matured to the stage where effects of conservation programs and practices on multiple ecosystem services can now be simulated in selected areas. Future work might include the continued development of modeling capabilities, as well as development and evaluation of differing conservation program and practice scenarios of interest to partner agencies including the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). When combined, the ecosystem services modeling capabilities of InVEST and the process-based abilities of the APEX model should provide complementary information needed to meet USDA and the Department of the Interior information needs. Introduction Ecosystems provide multiple provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting services important to societies across the globe (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Provisioning services are services that directly benefit a society by providing food, fuel, water, and other valued products. Regulating services benefit societies through their effects on events such as flooding, pesticide transport, and disease spread. Cultural services are the spiritual, religious, educational, recreational, and other, often nonmaterial, benefits received from having intact ecosystems on a landscape. Finally, supporting services are ecosystem functions and processes, such as nutrient cycling, soil formation, and primary production, that support all previously mentioned provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. Thus, supporting services are analogous to the functions and processes typically associated with wetlands and other ecosystems (Euliss and others, 2013, p. 187). Given not only the global importance of ecosystem services to societies and the vulnerability of natural ecosystems to threats associated with changing land uses and management practices, but also the potential to enhance services through targeted implementation of conservation programs and practices, there is great value in developing tools to facilitate the quantification of ecosystem services under differing land-use and land-management scenarios. In this report, we provide information on the status and potential future directions of a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) partnership to develop ecosystem service quantification tools and to use these tools to evaluate effects of conservation programs and practices on ecosystem services of value to society.