Ecosystem service flows from a migratory species: Spatial subsidies of the northern pintail

Abstract

Migratory species provide important benefits to society, but their cross-border conservation poses serious challenges. By quantifying the economic value of ecosystem services (ESs) provided across a species' range and ecological data on a species' habitat dependence, we estimate spatial subsidies-how different regions support ESs provided by a species across its range. We illustrate this method for migratory northern pintail ducks in North America. Pintails support over $101 million USD annually in recreational hunting and viewing and subsistence hunting in the U.S. and Canada. Pintail breeding regions provide nearly $30 million in subsidies to wintering regions, with the "Prairie Pothole" region supplying over $24 million in annual benefits to other regions. This information can be used to inform conservation funding allocation among migratory regions and nations on which the pintail depends. We thus illustrate a transferrable method to quantify migratory species-derived ESs and provide information to aid in their transboundary conservation.

Linking landscape-scale conservation to regional and continental outcomes for a migratory species

“…Deterministic FAC-PP models allow researchers to focus on shifts in central tendency and to identify key hypotheses to be tested with more intensive approaches that account for environmental and demographic stochasticity. Although these models require specification of vital rates and transition probabilities between age and habitat states 43 , they offer a compromise between data-hungry methods (e.g., integrated population models) 44 and more simplistic methods (e.g., migratory network models) 38 . Existing FAC population models, however, lack mechanisms for linking shifts in funding for landscape-scale conservation to changes in continental-scale population dynamics.…”

“…Inset map shows long-term average density of pintail pairs (pairs/km 2 ) among conservation-planning target landscapes represented by gray outlines within the Canadian Prairies. Graphics are adapted from existing figures in the literature43,49,51 .…”

The Role of Citizen Science in Conservation under the Telecoupling Framework

“…Studies show that when the general public is informed by such information, they are willing to invest and donate in the conservation activities in the neighbor countries [64,65]. More and more researchers are using the telecoupling framework to understand the ecosystem services provided by migratory species [34,37,38]. With the telecoupling framework, we are able to analyze the key players and factors in the framework such as flows, agents, causes, and effects.…”

“…Although the telecoupling framework is only developed recently in the last 5 years, there have already been a number of applications to address human-environment related issues in a variety of topics [30][31][32], including species invasion [20], land use change [33], ecosystem services [34], energy [35], forest management [36] and migratory species conservation [26,34,37,38]. Applications of the telecoupling framework are also filling research gaps in sustainable resource management, such as the spillover systems [39].…”

“…The monarch butterfly is an ideal species for this study because: (1). The ecosystem services provided by the monarch butterfly are estimated to offer up to $127 million in economic value per year, and the habitat in Mexico alone provides up to an estimated $13 million of benefits to the United States and Canada annually [38]. (2) People in the United States are estimated to be willing to pay $4.78 to $6.64 billion for the monarch conservation program [43], which will greatly enhance surrounding ecosystem services and functions [44].…”