The economic value of grassland species for carbon storage - PubMed (original) (raw)

The economic value of grassland species for carbon storage

Bruce A Hungate et al. Sci Adv. 2017.

Abstract

Carbon storage by ecosystems is valuable for climate protection. Biodiversity conservation may help increase carbon storage, but the value of this influence has been difficult to assess. We use plant, soil, and ecosystem carbon storage data from two grassland biodiversity experiments to show that greater species richness increases economic value: Increasing species richness from 1 to 10 had twice the economic value of increasing species richness from 1 to 2. The marginal value of each additional species declined as species accumulated, reflecting the nonlinear relationship between species richness and plant biomass production. Our demonstration of the economic value of biodiversity for enhancing carbon storage provides a foundation for assessing the value of biodiversity for decisions about land management. Combining carbon storage with other ecosystem services affected by biodiversity may well enhance the economic arguments for conservation even further.

Keywords: biodiversity; carbon storage; economic value; grassland; social cost of carbon; species diversity; species richness; valuation.

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Figures

Fig. 1

Fig. 1. Marginal carbon storage, which is the incremental change in cumulative carbon storage over 50 years caused by adding one additional species, as a function of final species richness, estimated from two grassland experiments (BioCON shown in gray; BigBio in blue).

Means are shown in solid lines, with shaded regions indicating 95% confidence intervals estimated from bootstrapping for plant carbon (top), soil carbon (middle), and total ecosystem carbon (bottom).

Fig. 2

Fig. 2. Marginal carbon accumulation over time at different levels of species richness.

Each line shows the additional carbon accumulated over time caused by increasing species richness by one species. Numeric labels on each curve indicate the specific increment in species richness, with “2” indicating the marginal carbon accumulation caused by increasing S from 1 to 2, “3” indicating the marginal carbon accumulation caused by increasing S from 2 to 3, etc., up to 16.

Fig. 3

Fig. 3. Marginal present discounted economic value over 50 years from adding one species as a function of final species richness, using three estimates of the social cost of carbon: low (green), medium (blue), and high (purple) estimates described by the U.S. government (25) and in Materials and Methods.

Marginal values were estimated from the two grassland experiments shown in Fig. 1 and are expressed here as USD (2010) per species per hectare, integrated over 50 years. (A) The marginal values for BigBio. (B) The marginal values for BioCON. Lines indicate means for each of the three estimates for the social cost of carbon. Shaded regions indicate 95% confidence intervals. For ease of visualization of values for BioCON, the confidence interval for the high estimate of the social cost of carbon is truncated at species richness of 15, and the confidence interval for the low estimate of the social cost of carbon begins at species richness of 3. For orientation, the position on the y axis (ordinate) corresponding to the x axis (abscissa) value of 5 shows the marginal value of adding the fifth species to a grassland initially containing four species.

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