Eliciting expert judgment to inform management of diverse oyster resources for multiple ecosystem services.

This study presents the most comprehensive set of ecosystem service provision estimates for diverse oyster-based resources to date. We use expert elicitation methods to derive estimates of five ecosystem services provided by oysters: oyster harvest (as indicated by oyster density), improved water quality (net nitrogen assimilation), shoreline protection (net erosion), and other fish habitat (blue crab and red drum density). Distributions are estimated for three distinct resources: on-bottom production, off-bottom farms, and non-harvested restoration/conservation efforts, under twelve distinct scenarios according to varying environmental conditions (eutrophication, sedimentation, and salinity regimes). Our expert-derived estimates of ecosystem services provide useful comparisons across oyster resources of both expected ecosystem service delivery levels and the amount of variation in those levels. These estimates bridge an information gap regarding relative performance of diverse oyster resources along multiple dimensions and should serve as a useful guide for resource managers facing competing interests.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Journal of Environmental Management

• Publication date

  2020-08-15

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110676PMID 32510433
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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