Ecosystem Services in Conservation Planning: Targeted Benefits vs. Co-Benefits or Costs? Kai M. A. Chan1*, Lara Hoshizaki1, Brian Klinkenberg2 1 Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 2 Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Abstract There is growing support for characterizing ecosystem services in order to link conservation and human well-being. However, few studies have explicitly included ecosystem services within systematic conservation planning, and those that have follow two fundamentally different approaches: ecosystem services as intrinsically-important targeted benefits vs. substitutable co-benefits. We present a first comparison of these two approaches in a case study in the Central Interior of British Columbia. We calculated and mapped economic values for carbon storage, timber production, and recreational angling using a geographical information system (GIS). These ���marginal��� values represent the difference in service-provision between conservation and managed forestry as land uses. We compared two approaches to including ecosystem services in the site-selection software Marxan: as Targeted Benefits, and as Co-Benefits/Costs (in Marxan���s cost function) we also compared these approaches with a Hybrid approach (carbon and angling as targeted benefits, timber as an opportunity cost). For this analysis, the Co-Benefit/Cost approach yielded a less costly reserve network than the Hybrid approach (1.6% cheaper). Including timber harvest as an opportunity cost in the cost function resulted in a reserve network that achieved targets equivalently, but at 15% lower total cost. We found counter-intuitive results for conservation: conservation- compatible services (carbon, angling) were positively correlated with each other and biodiversity, whereas the conservation- incompatible service (timber) was negatively correlated with all other networks. Our findings suggest that including ecosystem services within a conservation plan may be most cost-effective when they are represented as substitutable co- benefits/costs, rather than as targeted benefits. By explicitly valuing the costs and benefits associated with services, we may be able to achieve meaningful biodiversity conservation at lower cost and with greater co-benefits. Citation: Chan KMA, Hoshizaki L, Klinkenberg B (2011) Ecosystem Services in Conservation Planning: Targeted Benefits vs. Co-Benefits or Costs? PLoS ONE 6(9): e24378. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024378 Editor: Adina Maya Merenlender, University of California, Berkeley, United States of America Received October 14, 2010 Accepted August 9, 2011 Published September 6, 2011 Copyright: �� 2011 Chan et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was funded by a contract with the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC, http://www.natureconservancy.ca/) through UBC (ORSIL# 07-4916), a UBC Hampton Fund Research Grant (ORSIL# J05-0035), a Research Development Initiatives grant from the (Canadian) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/) (ORSIL # 06-1860), the Canada Research Chairs program, and a Canadian Foundation for Innovation/B.C. Knowledge Development Leaders Opportunity Fund grant (ORSIL# F07-0010). NCC supplied data and assistance with the biodiversity Marxan runs as described in the methods, but otherwise the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: kaichan@ires.ubc.ca Introduction Although the area of land protected has expanded considerably across the planet [1], such areas are alone insufficient to protect more than a small fraction of biodiversity [2,3,4,5]. But, in this crowded world, it is increasingly difficult to justify conservation for biodiversity���s sake without also demonstrating benefits for people. The concept of ecosystem services (the provision of benefits by ecosystems for people, directly and indirectly) offers a framework for characterizing and communicating the numerous benefits of conservation for people, such as food provision, water purification, and flood mitigation [2,6]. Proponents of ecosystem services hope that this concept will expand conservation activities and funding for them [7] while continuing to benefit people [8,9]. Ecosystem-based approaches to management are rapidly gaining momentum, with governments across the world requiring the simultaneous consideration of ecological sustainability and the flow of multiple benefits to people (ecosystem services) from ecosystems [10,11]. While much is known about individual ecosystem services (e.g., pollination [12,13] and carbon seques- tration as a means of climate regulation [14]), little is known about the distributions of multiple services alongside conservation priorities in landscapes [15] or their compatibility with biodiversity conservation. Recent research suggests that areas with high levels of biodiversity are not necessarily the areas that might be prioritized for ecosystem services [16,17,18,19]. Biodiversity conservation is often a catalyst for ecosystem-based approaches to management. Yet, conservation planning lacks an established means to measure the full extent of costs and benefits associated with alternative conservation plans, for people. Because ecosystem services can be important co-benefits or opportunity costs of conservation, there has been considerable interest in ecosystem services in planning [20]. But in the vast majority of cases the integration of services has been merely through biodiversity patterns or ecological processes that are assumed to be relevant for services [20]���there is urgent need for research that investigates the advantages and disadvantages of alternative frameworks for planning for ecosystem services. As the migration toward ecosystem services-based approaches for management increases, two key questions must be answered: PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 September 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 9 | e24378

(1) how well do biodiversity and ecosystem services correlate across space? And, given imperfect correlations, (2) how can we use existing planning tools to most effectively prioritize for a range of management considerations within a particular landscape and on a constrained budget? A central challenge in coupling ecosystem services research and conservation planning is that many efforts to value services [e.g., the biome-wide average value of all services provided by 1 hectare, as in���21] have no clear connection to decision-making [22]. Because planning requires knowledge of what might be lost or gained due to realistic changes [e.g., the value of changed service-provision associated with change in management of 1 hectare, recognizing that services will often not be lost completely���8,23]���our approach is to explicitly calculate the ecosystem-service consequences of conservation at the scale of each planning unit. To integrate ecosystem services into conservation planning, it is helpful to develop frameworks for marginal valuation compatible with the prevailing tools of reserve-design, such as Marxan [24]. Given the abundant popularity of Marxan with conservation practitioners and the importance of implementing conservation on the ground [25], we believe that using this approach has value, despite its limitations [16]. In the first published integration of services in Marxan, Chan et al. [16] considered differences in service provision between conservation and development in the central coast of California. A more significant challenge is posed by contexts in which primary alternative land-uses change the provision of services in more nuanced ways [e.g., lessening but not eliminating carbon storage���26]. In this study, we address this issue by calculating the difference in the value of services across conservation and timber harvesting land-use scenarios. There is no clear approach for integrating ecosystem services explicitly into conservation planning. In conservation planning, species, communities, and ecosystems are benefits for which ���targets��� are expressed [27,28]. Reserve-design algorithms combine this information on benefits with a ���cost surface��� [24] to specify protection of a network of places to meet the quantitative targets for these benefits [29]. Ecosystem services have been treated previously as ���Targeted Benefits��� to be protected while minimizing costs [16] and fishing has been incorporated as an opportunity cost in marine conservation planning analyses [our ���Co-Benefit/ Cost��� approach���30]. The Targeted Benefit approach includes services as intrinsically important within a framework of cost- minimization, whereas the Co-Benefit/Cost approach includes them as substitutable in a framework of net-benefit-maximization���a critical philosophical difference (see Discussion). Here, we expand the Benefit/Cost approach���including multiple ecosystem service values for the first time within the cost function of Marxan��� and offer a first comparison with the Targeted Benefit approach. We also combine these two approaches by including biodiversity- congruent services (recreational angling and carbon storage) as targeted benefits and incongruent services (timber production) as costs (our ���Hybrid��� approach) (Table 1). Inherent in our approach is recognition of a fact often glossed over in conservation literature and rhetoric: activities that realize the benefits of ecosystem services (e.g., harvest to realize benefits of timber production) will frequently be at odds with biodiversity conservation. But even in such cases of incompatibility, there may be great gains in conservation efficiency by including these services in conservation planning as opportunity costs [30,31]. In this paper we illustrate the inclusion of ecosystem services in a conservation plan in the Central Interior region of British Columbia (BC), Canada (Fig. 1), an ecoregional assessment of the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) [32]. This assessment is a coarse-scale analysis of general areas meriting protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services, not a pinpointing of particular sites and conservation actions, as appropriate at finer scales [e.g., 33]. Our analysis focuses principally on the different representa- tion of benefits and costs, and does not account for spatially variable threats. Accordingly, our ecosystem service layers are coarse-scale characterizations that do not reflect possible nuances in the management of such services. We present spatially explicit, marginal economic values of three ecosystem services (carbon storage, timber production, and the provision of recreational angling opportunities) and integrate them in the Targeted Benefit, Co-Benefit/Cost, and Hybrid approaches to answer the two key questions posed above. Carbon storage refers to the carbon stored in above and below ground biomass as well as soil [34]. If the forests in the study area were to be harvested, rather than conserved, a portion of the carbon stored in the landscape currently would be released into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. Conversely, a conserved landscape would contribute to the global service of climate regulation, a tradeoff between services [35]. The realization of benefits from timber production depends upon harvest, which as noted above is the primary threat to biodiversity in the region. The provision of recreational angling opportunities depends on several aspects of the surrounding landscape [36]. We assumed that timber harvesting increases sedimentation in streams due to soil Table 1. Scenarios examined in the current analysis, based on the biodiversity and or ecosystem services included and the approach adopted for each. Scenario Biodiversity Recreational Angling Carbon Storage Timber Production Biodiversity Targeted - - - Angling - Targeted - - Carbon - - Targeted - Timber - - - Targeted BD + ES Targeted Benefits Targeted Targeted Targeted Targeted BD + ES Hybrid (A, B) Targeted Targeted Targeted Opportunity Cost BD + ES Co-Benefit Targeted Co-benefit Co-benefit - BD + ES Co-Benefit/Cost Targeted Co-benefit Co-benefit Opportunity Cost Any ecosystem service could be included in conservation planning either as a Targeted benefit to be protected at a particular level (subject to cost constraints, with costs being minimized), or as a Co-Benefit/Cost to be maximized/minimized. BD = biodiversity ES = ecosystem services. Parameters were adjusted to allow comparability of BD + ES Targeted Benefits with BD + ES Hybrid A, and of BD + Hybrid B with BD + ES Co-Benefit/Cost. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024378.t001 Ecosystem Services in Conservation Planning PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 2 September 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 9 | e24378