Marine InVEST
Demonstration of Marine InVEST by Anne Guerry of the Natural Capital Project (October 12, 2010). The Marine Team of the Natural Capital Project is developing and applying the Marine InVEST tool (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs), a suite of spatially-explicit ecosystem service models. Marine InVEST is used to map and model ecosystem service flows and their changes under alternative management scenarios to elucidate the true costs and benefits of natural resource management options. The tool is applicable across multiple scales in coastal and marine regions with diverse habitats, policy questions, and stakeholders. To ensure maximum flexibility, ecosystem services are modeled individually, and the complexity of the model is determined by the questions to be answered and the availability of data. Examples of questions that Marine InVEST can help answer are “what kinds of coastal management and fisheries policies will give the best return for sustainable fisheries, shoreline, protection, and tourism?”, “are revenues from activities such as recreational fishing or scuba diving likely to rise or fall under a new fisheries management program?”, and “what benefits does marine spatial planning provide to society in addition to food from fishing and aquaculture and secure locations for wind or wave-energy facilities?” This presentation will demonstrate the tool, the validation process, its initial application in a spatial planning process on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and a new application in Belize. Learn more about Marine InVEST at www.naturalcapitalproject.org. Note: This webinar built on a first InVEST webinar held May 19, 2010.