Oral Presentation Society for Freshwater Science 2025 Annual Meeting

Watershed scale characterization of ecosystem services in human-dominated landscapes (117742)

Rebeca de Jesus Crespo 1 , Thomas Douthat 1 , Mariam Valladares 1 , Israt Tama 1 , Sharmin Siddika 1 , Catherine Pringle 2
  1. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, United States
  2. University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia

This presentation summarizes our work on watershed-scale ecosystem service (ES) modeling to inform conservation practices in human-dominated landscapes. First, we discuss our research in Costa Rican coffee farms, where we evaluated the role of agroforestry systems in water quality conservation and stream macroinvertebrate communities in collaboration with the Rainforest Alliance.  We then move on to Puerto Rico, where we modeled water purification ES on watersheds draining to reservoirs, coastal recreational locations, and the effects of these ES on water use and beach visitation rates.  In Louisiana, we partnered with the Capital Region Planning Commission to develop a decision support tool that linked urban revitalization goals to regional flood resilience planning. Our “Flood Resilient Redevelopment Index” integrates flood mitigation ecosystem services to identify parcels suitable for development initiatives or nature-based solutions. Lastly, through our ongoing work in Oklahoma and Nebraska, we are modeling water yield and sediment retention, and the impacts of these ES on agricultural irrigation and recreation opportunities.  Our work is defined by being co-designed by relevant stakeholders, executed using open-source tools and data, and the use of replicable methods for ecosystem service mapping and valuation.