Integrated ecosystem service assessment for landscape conservation design in the Green Bay watershed, Wisconsin

Comprehensive, partnership-driven, landscape-scale conservation planning presents challenges and opportunities to account for diverse articulations of ecosystem services. There is a need for research that engages scientists in building a body of knowledge built on technical and standardized meanings for ecosystem services, while maintaining flexibility to adapt to meanings held by communities. Herein, we share the results of an integrated ecosystem service assessment that leveraged inductive and deductive methods to identify critical services for the Fox River-Green Bay region of Wisconsin, USA according to stakeholders and experts. We found that stakeholders tended to emphasize components related to tradeoffs, management practices, and cultural benefits, while experts were instrumental in identifying ecological structures and functions, and considering the needs of stakeholders not at the table. We engaged with an expanded cascade model that included management and access concerns. This expanded cascade model helped integrate a wide range of stakeholder perspectives alongside technical knowledge and allowed us to identify several tradeoffs related to access between commercial and charter fisheries, and local farmers and agricultural tourists. By connecting services, benefits, and management and access concerns to particular stakeholder groups, we provide further evidence of ways in which what counts as a service is mediated through societal standing. This work highlights the need for integrating inductive and deductive approaches to ecosystem service assessments and outlines a path for integrated ecosystem service assessment through iterative, multi-level assessments.