A simple spatially-explicit seasonal model for valuing water provisioning (InVEST)

Abstract:

There is a high demand for tools estimating the effect of landscape management on water supply service (e.g. for irrigation, domestic use, hydropower production). In practice, there is often a trade-off between model complexity and accuracy, especially when resources for watershed management are scarce.

We developed a model for the supply, service, and value of seasonal water provisioning, available to the ecosytem services community through the open-source InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosytem Services and Trade-offs) software. The model is characterized by i) low data requirements, with the aim of being applied in data-scarce environments; ii) spatially-explicit outputs, to easily address spatial planning questions; iii) a seasonal time-step, representing a compromise between data knowledge and ability to address season-dependent questions (water supply for irrigation, hydropower production); iv) explicit representation of beneficiaries, to facilitate valuation of the provisioning service for different groups; v) flexible valuation framework, to address a variety of ES questions.

In this presentation, I will highlight the pros and cons of simple physics-based models for ecosystem services assessment, and illustrate them with a national-scale natural capital assessment and associated uncertainty analyses.