New Tools for Estimating Location-specific Ecosystem Values at National Scale to Inform Sustainable Management
Profile
New Tools for Estimating Location-specific Ecosystem Values at National Scale to Inform Sustainable Management
PIs: Hannah Druckenmiller and Georgia Gkioxari
Research Team: Lauren Hyoseo Yoon
Division of Engineering and Applied Science
Climate Science Initiative
We aim to develop a new framework for estimating location-specific ecosystem values by combining advances in economics, computer vision, and multi-modal machine learning. Our approach is designed to be both causality-enabled and capable of accounting for rich variation in ecosystem values conditional on local natural and human systems. We aim to make our new framework the gold standard for large-scale environmental valuation. We then apply our framework to the valuation of wetlands for flood protection, producing a repository of wetland valuations with national coverage that we will strive to make a go-to resource for conservation planning and management decisions.