http://www.ecosystemvaluation.org/index.html
The Ecosystem Valuation website is a site that helps people who are not economist or do not have backgrounds in economy to find ways to quantify the many values provided to humans from ecosystem services. The ability to place a value on an ecosystem and the ecological functions it provides is very powerful because it allows people to see landscapes and ecosystems for their value rather than their physical attributes.
The site is broken down into six sections; purposes and uses, the big picture, essentials of ecosystem valuation, dollar-based ecosystem valuation methods, and ecosystem benefit indicators. Each section takes complicated economic theories and simplifies them for the average person.
For this post I will focus on the section titled the “Big Picture”. This section provides a great overview of why it is important to value ecosystems and a brief overview of the different ways this can be done. Each section provides examples of when it is best to use certain methods and their advantages. This section is a great place to start if you are someone who needs to place a value on a certain ecosystem or ecosystem service for a class, project, or own interest. I used this website for my senior seminar to help value coastal wetland’s ecosystem services and it was extremely helpful for someone like me who is not well versed in economics.
-Austen
Hey Austen,
This website provides a great summary of the field of Environmental Economics. I went to a lecture on campus earlier this semester that I found very interesting, and this website is a great supplementary source of information. The website is relatively simple, yet packed with a bunch of insightful information. I am surprised the website still seems so old, but I still think the information on the website is useful in applying a justification for saving the environment.
As someone who has always shied away from anything math and economics related, this website really helped bring those abstract concepts down to earth. Like the person who commented before me, I went to that lecture on evaluating ecosystem services and found it fascinating. I think concepts like this are “under taught”, especially if one is to formulate a sound argument for conservation of the environment. Good stuff.