Suchergebnisse

Military bases provide substantial ecosystem services to local communities and other members of the public. This project conceptualizes and quantifies ecosystem services provided by U.S. military bases developing an integrated modeling platform called MoTIVES (Model-based Tracking and Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services). MoTIVES manages probabilistic simulations of biophysical and economic models for relevant ecosystem services provided by alternative base management scenarios, and then assigns values where valuation is possible. The project demonstrated a proof of concept at Eglin Air Force Base, showing that current management provides approximately $110 million in ecosystem services per year, $40 million more than a scenario where no base was present, and $90 million more than a scenario where no base management was occurring. ; Published (Publication status)

Governments and social benefit organizations are expected to consider evidence in decision-making. In development and sustainability, evidence spans disciplines and methodological traditions and is often inconclusive. Graphical models are widely promoted to organize interdisciplinary evidence and improve decision-making by considering mediating variables. However, the reproducibility, objectivity and benefits for decision-making of graphical models have not been studied. We evaluate these considerations in the setting of energy services in the developing world, a contemporary development and sustainability imperative. We develop a database of relevant causal relations (313 concepts, 1337 relationships) asserted in the literature (561 peer-reviewed articles). We demonstrate that high-level relationships of interest to practitioners feature less consistent evidence than the causal relationships that underpin them, supporting increased use of problem decomposition through graphical modeling approaches. However, adding such detail increases complexity exponentially, introducing a hazard of overparameterization if evidence is not available to match the level of mechanistic detail. ; Published (Publication status)