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Intelligent Databases Assist Transparent and Sound Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services

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Abstract

Assessment and economic valuation of services provided by ecosystems to humans has become a crucial phase in environmental management and policy-making. As primary valuation studies are out of the reach of many institutions, secondary valuation or benefit transfer, where the results of previous studies are transferred to the geographical, environmental, social, and economic context of interest, is becoming increasingly common. This has brought to light the importance of environmental valuation databases, which provide reliable valuation data to inform secondary valuation with enough detail to enable the transfer of values across contexts. This paper describes the role of next-generation, intelligent databases (IDBs) in assisting the activity of valuation. Such databases employ artificial intelligence to inform the transfer of values across contexts, enforcing comparability of values and allowing users to generate custom valuation portfolios that synthesize previous studies and provide aggregated value estimates to use as a base for secondary valuation. After a general introduction, we introduce the Ecosystem Services Database, the first IDB for environmental valuation to be made available to the public, describe its functionalities and the lessons learned from its usage, and outline the remaining needs and expected future developments in the field.

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Acknowledgments

The ESD was developed with the support of grant 9982938/0243957 from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). IDB activities at the Ecoinformatics Collaboratory are also funded through the SEEK grant (NSF 0225676 for Villa and Krivov) and the SEAMLESS grant (European Union 010036-2 for Villa). Important contributions to the ESD contents and architecture were provided by Shuang Liu, Matthew Wilson, Roelof Boumans, and Robert Costanza. Comments by Joe Roman, Rudolf De Groot, Paul Sutton, and an anonymous reviewer greatly helped the clarity and the editorial shape of the manuscript. We also thank Jorge Brenner for useful comments and productive discussions on the ESD.

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  1. Ecoinformatics Collaboratory, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont, 617 Main Street, Burlington, VT, 05401, USA

    Ferdinando Villa, Marta Ceroni & Sergey Krivov

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  1. Ferdinando Villa
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  2. Marta Ceroni
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  3. Sergey Krivov
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Correspondence to Ferdinando Villa.

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Villa, F., Ceroni, M. & Krivov, S. Intelligent Databases Assist Transparent and Sound Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services. Environmental Management 39, 887–899 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-006-0269-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-006-0269-8

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