Project summary report – Fresh water Ecosystem Services Project – Phase 1

TR 2017/04
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Report: TR 2017/04

Author: Femi Olubode-Awosola

About this report

In the Waikato Regional Policy Statement, objective 3.8 states that the council will take an ecosystem services approach to recognise and maintain or enhance fresh water ecosystem services to enable their ongoing contribution to regional wellbeing. Monitoring ecosystem services and socioeconomic and cultural values could enable better management of these resources and so increase the productivity and efficiency of resource use for community wellbeing. This is because the ecosystem services approach to natural resource management, in principle, considers all services to all sectors of a community.

To facilitate this approach, tools such as maps and a database of ecosystem services are useful at the level of detail at which policy and management decisions are made. This study provides some understanding of services and values of fresh water bodies (rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands) in the Waikato region by assessing the ecosystem services and association values using maps and an underlying database system showing current and potential ecosystem services of a sample of fresh water bodies in the region.

The database system allows structured querying, searching and updating of the database as more information becomes available on these ecosystems. The ecological status and health of the ecosystems provide an indication of the services and values of these natural resources using the Millennium Ecosystem and Assessment (MEA) and the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) frameworks. This will help the regional council’s capacity in monitoring the effectiveness of its natural resource management and policies.

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Project summary report – Fresh water Ecosystem Services Project – Phase 1 [PDF, 11 MB]

Contents
  Abstract v
  Executive summary vii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Objectives 2
1.2 Work activities 2
2 Literature review 4
2.1 Ecosystem services – concepts and assessment framework 4
2.2 Applications of ecosystems services approach 5
2.3 Indicators of ecosystem services 6
3 Fieldworks and data collection 8
3.1 Fresh water ecosystems in the region 8
3.2 Data collection and ecosystem assessment 9
4 Fieldwork reports 11
5 Project summary 12
5.1 Database of ecosystem services 12
5.2 Web-maps of ecosystem services 12
6 Conclusion and recommendations 20
6.1 Conclusions 20
6.2 Recommendations 20
6.3 Limitations of the study and future work areas 20
  References 22
  Appendices 26
  Appendix A: Ecosystem Services Indicators 27
  Appendix B: Sampled sites (Ecosystems) 38
  Appendix C: Feedback on Sample Sites and Ecosystem Service Indicators 40
  Appendix D: Fieldwork Reports 41
  Appendix E: Database 42