Resumen de Building a decision - support methodolgy to define ecosystem services bundles and to analyze trade-offs in diverse landscapes. Application to ecuadorian ecosystems
Fátima del Rocío Delgado Medina
A key challenge of ecosystem management is determining how to manage multiple ecosystem services across landscapes. Enhancing provisioning ecosystem services (i.e., food, timber, etc.) might lead to tradeoffs between regulating and cultural ecosystem services (i.e., nutrient cycling, flood protection, tourism, etc.). Ecosystem service-bundle analysis can help to identify areas on a landscape where ecosystem (mis)management has produced (un)desirable sets of ecosystem services. Ecuador is now suffering the effects of intensive land-use (LU) change, a fact that is reconfiguring landscapes at all spatial levels. This process generates (a) land fragmentation resulted from the gradual clearing of native forests, (b) the introduction of patches of plantations in open grasslands and sensible ecosystems, and finally (c) an impact on ecosystem services (ES). It is thus primordial to develop a decision support methodology able to assess ES at different scales and to help decision-makers to articulate objectives more clearly and evaluate the consequences of alternative management actions. In this research we aim at setting the stage for developing this kind of decision support methodology, taking into account: the many constraints regarding data availability in terms of types (i.e., numerical, spatial, imagery, etc.) and acquisition (i.e., remote sensing, open official information, on-site, etc.), the temporal evolution and dynamic change of ES and ES-bundles, and the influence of fragmentation (stage of criticality) in this change. We consider two case studies at different spatial scales: Guayas ecosystem and Abras de Mantequilla (AdM) wetland. These have been chosen for their ecosystemic and environmental importance for the whole country, in terms both of regulating and provisioning ES, and for being important ecological sites now much under human pressure and land-use change dynamics. The main contribution of this thesis is to have been highly capable to design and obtain a protocol of action in the decision-making processes built from real and accurate data acquired through modern technologies -not necessarily implying that the data is of high quality-, socio-economic knowledge of the environment and recent complexity theories implementation.
