Evaluating opportunities to enhance ecosystem services in public use areas

Public use and conservation areas (PUAs) offer opportunities to protect and enhance the delivery of ecosystem services (ES), however ES are rarely evaluated on such lands. We developed a spatially-explicit method for estimating regulating and cultural service capacity and evaluating intent to conserve ES in PUAs. We use management priority information to infer conservation intent and demonstrate the application of a social capacity metric for assessing cultural service capacity. We present a decision framework to guide efforts to enhance the delivery of benefits to public land users and downstream residents. We test this approach by pairing analyses of two ecosystem services—water purification and recreational bird watching-in PUAs throughout the Albemarle–Pamlico basin (Virginia and North Carolina). Our results reveal that management of the majority of sites does not currently give priority to either service, despite a wide range of service capacities. The decision framework suggests that managers of PUAs with moderate to high service capacity could protect ES flow by increasing awareness and other social capacity factors within PUAs. In contrast, managers of PUAs with low service capacity but high potential to influence local and regional environmental condition might focus on enhancing the biophysical capacity to provide selected services.