Ecoinformatics Conference Service, International Conference on Ecological Informatics 6

THE VALUE OF ECOSYSTEMS SERVICES IN A NATIONAL PARK; A GIS APPROACH TO THEIR SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION

Joaquín Buitrago, Martin Rada, Maria Elizabeth Barroeta-Hlusicka, Eneida Fajardo, Luís Ruiz

Last modified: 2008-09-13

Abstract


La Restinga National Park, in Margarita Island, is one of the main coastal marine protected areas in Venezuela. Comprising large mangrove swamp areas, salt beds and sandy beaches, this RAMSAR site supports intense tourism use and is located in an important fisheries region. The park contains also large terrestrial xerophytic environments key to the region. Thus providing ecosystem services, which are the benefits people obtain either directly or indirectly, from ecological systems. To have ecosystem service value estimates broken down by land cover class, land use and service type, may be a powerful tool to plan for explicit ecosystem service value transfer. Thanks to the increased ease of using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the public availability of high quality land cover data sets, biogeographic entities such as forests, wetlands and beaches can now more easily be attributed with the ecosystem services they deliver on the ground. Costal and shallow water marine communities, substrate and fishermen villages were field GPS georeferenced. Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE), by operations between polygons in different maps, was used to add the values for each use. Resultant vectors in thematic maps of the same criterion were added, to obtain smaller polygons, so each point in the study area had a qualification in every use. Finally, MCE was used to combine value polygons, creating even smaller polygons of added value. Results show that 37% of direct consumptive value corresponds to shellfish (oysters and clams) extraction and sport fisheries, activities that take place in only 1.15% of the park. As far as the indirect use services although tourism accounts for 99% of income, boat refuge is by far the most valuable per area.