Assessing Ecosystem Service Values for Marine and Coastal Ecosystems:  Melding the Natural and Social Sciences
Session Organizers: Mary Ruckelshaus, Anne Guerry, and Mark Plummer

Description: Coastal and marine ecosystems are the source of a wide variety of valuable goods and services.  Some are as obvious as a marketable commodity, such as salmon fillets and clam chowder.  Others are less obvious but still valuable, such as shoreline stabilization and carbon sequestration.  The concept of ecosystem goods and services - or simply ecosystem services - captures the full extent of this natural bounty. Understanding and modeling the ecological systems that produce these services are tasks for natural scientists.  A focus on ecosystem services, however, is inherently anthropocentric, and so the social sciences play a key role in identifying those services, assessing their significance, and quantifying their values.  Developing a scientific framework for coastal and marine ecosystem services capable of supporting management decisions, then, requires active participation of both branches of science.

This symposium will highlight the challenges and promise of building integrated ecological-economic models to assess marine and coastal ecosystem services.  The symposium will offer the perspectives of natural and social scientists (economists as well as anthropologists) that work in this area.  Three examples will be explored in detail with paired talks by natural and social scientists collaborating on marine and coastal ecosystem services research in a range of ecological systems.  Also, we will have synthetic talks by experts in each field addressing the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration on ecosystem services work.

Like the conference's theme, this symposium will explore interfaces and connections.  Three types of connections, in particular, are central to our symposium.  First, marine and coastal ecological-human systems lie at the interface between land and sea.  Second, our focus on ecosystem services demonstrates linkages between natural systems and human well-being.  And third, our exploration of the challenges and opportunities inherent in the integration of ecological and human sciences highlights the necessity for closely coordinated interdisciplinary research.