TESSA: A toolkit for rapid assessment of ecosystem services at sites of biodiversity conservation importance
TESSA: A toolkit for rapid assessment of ecosystem services at sites of biodiversity conservation importance
Many sites that are important for biodiversity conservation also provide significant benefits (i.e. ecosystem services) to people. Understanding the effects of changes to a site on the the delivery of services and the distribution of any benefits among stakeholders is important, but the carrying out ecosystem service assessments generally relies on substantial resources or specialist technical knowledge. The authors of this paper present a new tool, the the Toolkit for Ecosystem Service Site-based Assessment (TESSA), which has been developed for use by local non-specialists, enabling the identification of which ecosystem services may be important at a site, and for evaluating the magnitude of benefits that people obtain from them currently, compared with those expected under alternative land-uses.
The development of TESSA was partially funded by the CCI Collaborative Fund.
Suggested citation: Peh, K.S.-H., et al. (2013) TESSA: A toolkit for rapid assessment of ecosystem services at sites of biodiversity conservation importance. Ecosystem Services, 5, e51–e57.
Collaboration / Project(s)
Measuring and monitoring ecosystem services at the site scale: building practical tools for real-world conservation
This project aims to develop and deploy a rapid assessment tool to understand how far conserving sites for their biodiversity importance also helps to conserve different ecosystem services (ESs), relative to a converted state. The tool is being piloted at a diverse range of sites in the UK, Nepal and Montserrat. Publication of the methods…
Demonstrating ecosystem service values in Africa
Despite growing awareness of the importance of ecosystem services in supporting human well-being, conservationists are rarely able to provide policy-makers with robust information about the overall consequences of land use decisions. Existing locally-relevant data are too patchy and the methods, skills and resources needed to collect new information are typically unavailable. To address this issue,…