Nature’s Services and Contributions: The Relational Value of Childhood Nature Experience and the Importance of Reciprocity

People depend on functioning ecosystems to meet human needs and support well-being across the life span. This article considers the interest in ecosystem service valuation, the growing interest in the benefits of nature experience for children, and ways to bridge these perspectives. We focus on embodied childhood nature experiences: the physical and multisensory experiences that intertwine child and nature. Additionally, we highlight the reciprocal quality of nature and child experience relationship as an example of how this relationship goes beyond the instrumental and demonstrates relational value. Underlying this perspective is the belief that children need to be better represented in the perception and action of ecosystem valuation in environmental policy.

Coastal Resources Economics and Ecosystem Valuation

The papers in this special issue provide new insights into ongoing research to value coastal and marine ecosystem services, and offer meaningful information for policymakers and resource managers about the economic significance of coastal resources for planning, restoration, and damage assessment. Study areas encompass a broad geographic scope from the Gulf of Mexico in the United States, to the Caribbean, the European Union, Australia, and Southeast Asia. The focus of these papers ranges from theoretical perspectives on linkages between ecosystem services and resource management, to the actual integration of valuation information in coastal and marine resource policy decisions, and to the application of economic valuation methods to specific coastal and marine resource management problems. We hope readers will appreciate these new contributions to the growing literature on coastal and marine resource ecosystem services valuation.

Valuing Marine Ecosystems - Taking into account the value of ecosystem benefits in the Blue Economy

The main aim of this publication is to highlight the current thinking in ecosystem service valuation for the marine environment. Valuation of the benefits stemming from marine ecosystem services, including often unnoticed benefits to society, can help to assess the long-term sustainability of blue growth, support policy development and marine management decisions, and raise awareness of the importance of the marine environment to society and in the economy. Recommendations are made on how to incorporate outputs from valuation studies into the traditional analyses used in resource and environmental economics and into the European marine policy landscape and related management and decision making choices. The publication is primarily aimed at stakeholders interested in valuation of marine ecosystem services and natural capital accounting, spanning diverse roles from commissioning, managing, funding and coordinating, to developing, implementing, or advising on, marine ecosystem service and natural capital programmes. Such programmes will have strategic and policy drivers but their main purpose may vary from predominantly research driven science to provision of valuation data and reporting to legally-binding regulations or directives. The main focus is on European capabilities but set in a global context with the various actors spanning a variety of geographical scales from national to regional and European. Key stakeholder organizations include environmental or other agencies; marine research institutions, their researchers and operators; international and regional initiatives and programmes; national, regional and European policy makers and their advisors. It will also be of interest to the wider marine and maritime research and policy community. The publication recommends:1.Marine ecosystem valuation should be used to support policy making, regulation and management and decision making;2.The quality and availability of monetary and non-monetary valuation data should be improved and increased through research, development and implementation actions;3.The spatial and temporal dimensions of ecosystem valuation need to be mapped and their implications for policy and management decisions assessed;4.In order to strengthen the use and derivation of ecosystem service values to support policy, regulation and management, underpinning research and development actions should be undertaken:a.To improve understanding of the role of marine biodiversity and ecosystem processes in providing services and benefits;b.To improve modelling approaches to support ecosystem valuation and decision making;5.Systems to enable and use marine natural capital accounting and enhance the experimental ecosystem accounts should be further developed and implemented including:a. A natural capital portfolio approach utilising existing marine data sets and assessment results and addressing scale and aggregation as well as ecosystem degradation;b.Valuation methods for both ecosystem services and assets that can be standardised and are compatible with National Accounting;c.Payment for marine ecosystem services and other financing mechanisms to restore marine natural capital and improve its sustainable use.

Dominance determines fish community biomass in a temperate seagrass ecosystem

Biodiversity and ecosystem function are often correlated, but there are multiple hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. Ecosystem functions such as primary or secondary production may be maximized by species richness, evenness in species abundances, or the presence or dominance of species with certain traits. Here, we combined surveys of natural fish communities (conducted in July and August, 2016) with morphological trait data to examine relationships between diversity and ecosystem function (quantified as fish community biomass) across 14 subtidal eelgrass meadows in the Northeast Pacific (54° N 130° W). We employed both taxonomic and functional trait measures of diversity to investigate if ecosystem function is driven by species diversity (complementarity hypothesis) or by the presence or dominance of species with particular trait values (selection or dominance hypotheses). After controlling for environmental variation, we found that fish community biomass is maximized when taxonomic richness and functional evenness is low, and in communities dominated by species with particular trait values – those associated with benthic habitats and prey capture. While previous work on fish communities has found that species richness is positively correlated with ecosystem function, our results instead highlight the capacity for regionally prevalent and locally dominant species to drive ecosystem function in moderately diverse communities. We discuss these alternate links between community composition and ecosystem function and consider their divergent implications for ecosystem valuation and conservation prioritization.