Ecosystem services in the Westfield and Deerfield valleys of  western Massachusetts 

The woods of western Massachusetts are a lot more than:

• Pretty in the fall;
• A place to hunt or fish;
• Where maple syrup comes from;
• Habitat for a wide variety of wildlife;
• A place to hike, ski, or drive snowmobiles;
• A source of wood to heat homes, build furniture and other items.

Woods in the ACORN area are a bountiful provider of what are known as ecosystem services. These are the goods and services that come from forests and enrich our lives day-by-day.

Clean air and water, flood control, greenhouse gas storage, scenic backdrop to a rural tourism industry, and other cultural and social benefits like privacy and a local sense of history are all benefits provided by the woods in the ACORN area. And: those goods and services don’t necessarily come from the state or federal government- roughly 3/4ths of all woods in Massachusetts are owned by thousands of families and individuals. In fact, there are over 15,000 private families and individuals who own wooded properties greater than 10 acres in the ACORN area. Collectively, that patchwork quilt of thousands of private ownerships is the source of the wealth of benefits or ecosystem services every day.

So, are these ecosystem services worth real money, or are they just a figment of someone’s imagination? The real dollar value of these is tough to estimate, as you can guess. How do you estimate the value of carbon sequestration or clean water? One way is by estimating what you’d have to pay for the service otherwise, if you weren’t getting it for free. For example: In Massachusetts, metropolitan Boston’s Quabbin reservoir supplies water to 2.5 million people every day. There is no filtration plant- the reservoir is surrounded by roughly 100,000 acres of forest, and this provides excellent natural filtration. If you had to build a filtration plant to handle all that water on a daily basis, you’d spend over $500,000,000. The back-off-the-napkin estimate is that forests provide an ongoing value of $5,000 per acre of filtration for the residents of Boston. How much do visiting tourists or hunters and anglers spend in the ACORN area in western Massachusetts? Would they visit and spend as much if the forests were converted to houses, and it looked like Connecticut or New Jersey? Since trees take up water and stabilize the soil, they provide invaluable flood control benefits. If the forests of the ACORN area were converted to some other use, how much flooding would occur in the Westfield and Deerfield River valleys? What would the alternate cost be of additional dams to control flows, and the property damage along the banks? One estimate generated for forests of the world is $1,357 per acre for benefits like water supply and erosion control [see the Costanza article in Nature, link below]. Forests in the ACORN area take up carbon dioxide as they grow, keeping it from getting to the atmosphere and building up as a greenhouse gas. The increase in greenhouse gases has been linked to global climate change. Some future models estimate that the composition of forests will shift as climate changes (see: http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/delaware/atlas/). What is the value of stabilizing climate or ensuring that the forests of Massachusetts remain stocked with sugar maple?

As you can see, there are more questions than solid answers. And people are not knocking on the doors of woodland owners offering to pay them for the ecosystem services provided by their forest. This may change someday, though. In the meantime, it helps to appreciate the facts that:

• Forests do provide seriously valuable benefits to us all, and
• In the ACORN area, as in most of the eastern US, the majority of the forest is owned by private families and individuals.

Like the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs, forests provide these benefits for free. [see: http://www.happychild.org.uk/nvs/cont/stories/aesopsfables/page0002.htm] And taking care of the woods of the ACORN area means these benefits will continue to be delivered.

Interesting links and sources of information:

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx

Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont. http://www.uvm.edu/giee/?Page=default.html

Ecosystem Services: a primer, from the Ecological Society of America: http://www.actionbioscience.org/environment/esa.html

The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Costanza, R. et al. in Nature: http://www.uvm.edu/giee/research/publications/Nature_Paper.pdf

Valuing ecosystem services: http://www.fs.fed.us/ecosystemservices/

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