Ecosystem Services Valuation for Hawaii’s Largest Private Landowner

Ecosystem Services Valuation for Hawaii’s Largest Private Landowner

SIG collaborated with Hawaii’s largest private landowner to integrate an ecosystem services framework into land management planning. We developed a custom ecosystem service typology, conducted extensive literature reviews, held stakeholder workshops, mapped key landscapes, modeled connections between landscapes and beneficiaries, reviewed strategies for ecosystem markets, identified high-priority management strategies, and created indicators for landscape health and interventions.

Forest Carbon Markets: Native People Quantify The Growing Value Of Native Lands

Forest Carbon Markets

Carbon markets are based on the premise that sources (greenhouse gas-emitting power plants, vehicles, farm animal waste) and sinks (greenhouse gas-absorbing forests, biogas digesters, healthy soil) can be “traded” between states, regions and countries to help each other offset and reduce overall carbon emissions. While carbon markets are not a perfect solution to atmospheric carbon reduction, they have benefits…not least of which is getting communities to take stock of their natural resources and find ways to better manage, protect, and restore them.

As Science Funding Decreases, Technology May Protect Our Ecological Future

Science Funding technology

In an increasingly populated, financially-strained, and ecologically-stressed world, scientists are facing mounting pressure to find quick answers to social and environmental challenges. But, In the field of ecology, solutions almost never come quickly. They take miles of hiking through uninviting terrain, months of laboratory sample testing, and weeks of data analyses to devise some of the most basic answers to the most basic questions. Fortunately for ecologists, new uses of technology, particularly airborne remote-sensing technology, are helping them obtain these answers more quickly than they were able to only a few years ago.