Research effort devoted to regulating and supporting ecosystem services by environmental scientists and economists.

• Published in: PLOS ONE
• Main Authors: Andrew N Kadykalo, Lisa A Kelly, Albana Berberi, Jessica L Reid, C Scott Findlay
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021
• Subjects: Medicine; R; Science; Q; Arctic; Tundra
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252463; https://doaj.org/article/99ffb861e24d4738b17595a69f16627e

The economic valuation of ecosystem services in part reflects the desire to use conventional economic tools (markets and economic instruments) to conserve ecosystem services. However, for regulating and supporting ecosystem services that depend on ecosystem structure and function, estimation of economic value requires estimates of the current level of underlying ecological functions first. This primary step is in principle, the job of environmental scientists, not economists. Here, we provide a coarse-level quantitative assessment of the relationship between the research effort expended by environmental scientists (on the biophysical values) and economists (on the monetary values) on 15 different regulating and supporting services in 32 ecosystem types using peer-reviewed article hits retrieved from bibliographic databases as a measure of research effort. We find a positive, moderately strong (r = 0.69) correlation between research efforts in the two domains, a result that, while encouraging, is likely to reflect serendipity rather than the deliberate design of integrated environmental science-economics research programs. Our results suggest that compared to environmental science research effort economic valuation is devoted to a smaller, less diverse set of ecosystem services but a broader, more diverse, set of ecosystem types. The two domains differed more with respect to the ecosystem services that are the major focus of research effort than they did with respect to the ecosystem types of principal research interest. For example, carbon sequestration, erosion regulation, and nutrient cycling receive more relative research effort in the environmental sciences; air quality regulation in economic valuations. For both domains, cultivated areas, wetlands, and urban/semi-urban ecosystem types received relatively large research effort, while arctic and mountain tundra, cave and subterranean, cryosphere, intertidal/littoral zone, and kelp forest ecosystem types received negligible research effort. We suggest ways and ...