Increased capacity to monitor ecosystem services provisioning

• Fonafifo staff in Costa Rica learned how to use the InVEST modeling tool

October 31, 2022. In order to strengthen the capacities of the staff of the Forestry Financing Fund (Fonafifo) of Costa Rica in the use of modeling tools for decision-making on water resources, staff from the Environmental Economics and Sustainable Agribusiness Unit (UEAAS/EfD) of CATIE (Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) conducted a training course entitled Monitoring the provision of ecosystem services with InVEST for decision-making..

Held on October 18, 19 and 20 in San José, the training also sought to update participants' knowledge of water dynamics at the farm, forest and landscape scales, as well as to demonstrate how spatially explicit models can be used to evaluate indicators of water ecosystem services and guide decision-making based on the objectives of the Payment for Environmental Services Program (PPSA, its Spanish acronym).

Importance to Costa Rica

Barbara Viguera, researcher at UEAAS/EfD, was part of the group of instructors in the training. She believes that this type of training is important because it promotes the use of spatial information of the territory to direct resources to areas that have the potential to generate more ecosystem services, and thus generate more impacts at the same cost.

In the case of Costa Rica, this is important given that Payment for Environmental Services (PES) has been positively related to the reduction of deforestation rates, forest recovery and land degradation.

However, although it is estimated that by implementing different conservation policies, including the PES program, the country has increased forest cover, there is insufficient data to identify the level of impact on the improvement of ecosystem services, such as biodiversity conservation or improved water quantity and quality.

"Spatial analysis of landscape-scale dynamics helps to understand the flows of ecosystem services provided by forests and other ecosystems, and to quantify changes in the provision of these ecosystem services as a result of PES, other land-use changes, or changes in climate," said Viguera regarding the contributions to be gained from implementing the InVEST modeling tool.

Getting to know InVEST

InVEST stands for Integrated Assessment of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs and is a tool with more than twenty models used to map and value nature's goods and services that sustain human life, according to information provided by Stanford University.

Similarly, InVEST helps explore how changes in ecosystems can lead to changes in flows of many different benefits to people.

The tool is free software and accessible to anyone at https://naturalcapitalproject.stanford.edu/software/invest.