Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Using Ecosystem Services in Marine Decision-Making

President Obama’s Executive Order 13547, issued on July 19, 2010, established a National Ocean Policy (NOP) and created a regionally-based, national framework for coastal and marine spatial planning (CMSP).  Although preservation of critical ecosystem services is a central tenet of the NOP, managing directly for sustained, simultaneous delivery of numerous services is likely to be challenging.  However, an increasing body of evidence suggests that natural biodiversity supports sustained provision of a broad range of essential ecosystem services, although the mechanisms involved are poorly understood.  Thus, in addition to a focus on specific ecosystem services, it may also be practical to concentrate on protection of natural biodiversity as a means to maintain services and to use comparative effects on biodiversity and services as common “currencies” for evaluating trade-offs among potentially competing uses of ocean and coastal space.    Biodiversity protection cannot be accomplished effectively one or a few species at the time, but requires identification of proxies or surrogates (e.g. major structure-forming habitats) that would protect substantial species and functional biodiversity and the ecosystem services they underpin (e.g., fisheries production, storm protection, waste assimilation, etc.). Such surrogates must be geospatially identifiable to be managed and protected via CMSP.  Ecologically significant areas (i.e., biodiversity proxies) could be identified and ranked on the basis of demonstrated (or presumptive) biodiversity richness and contribution to ecosystem services via regional Integrated Ecosystem Assessments. This information could then be used in spatial planning scenarios where relative compatibility or incompatibility of various ocean uses could be analyzed based on anticipated impacts to areas of high species and functional biodiversity and service delivery.  The emphasis would be on identifying, via agreed upon indices, those uses of an ecologically important area that would be most, moderately, and least compatible with conservation of its significant biological and ecosystem service delivery attributes, and developing final CMS Plans based, at least in part, on such considerations.