Data from: Win-wins or trade-offs? Site and strategy determine carbon and local ecosystem service benefits for protection, restoration, and agroforestry
Data files
Aug 15, 2024 version files 393.27 MB
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McDonald_et_al_2024_Data_Dryad.zip
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README.md
Abstract
This data package contains original datasets from McDonald et al. (2024), available online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2024.1432654
Nature-based solutions (NBS) can deliver many benefits to human well-being, including some crucial to climate adaptation. We quantitatively assess the global potential of NBS strategies of protection, restoration, and agroforestry by modeling global climate change mitigation and local ecosystem services. The strategies with the most potential to help people do not necessarily deliver the most climate change mitigation: per area of conservation action, agroforestry provides substantial benefits to three times more people on average than reforestation while providing less than one-tenth the carbon sequestration per unit area. Each strategy delivers a different suite of ecosystem service benefits; for instance, avoided forest conversion provides a strong increase in nitrogen retention (100% increase to 72 million people if fully implemented globally) while agroforestry increases pollination services (100% increase to 3.0 billion people if fully implemented globally). One common disservice shared by all the NBS strategies modeled here is that increased woody biomass increases transpiration, reducing annual runoff and in some watersheds negatively impacting local water availability. In addition, the places with the greatest potential for climate change mitigation are not necessarily the ones with the most people. For instance, reforestation in Latin America has the greatest climate change mitigation potential, but the greatest ecosystem service benefits are in Africa. Focusing on nations with high climate mitigation potential as well as high local ecosystem service potential, such as Nigeria in the case of reforestation, India for agroforestry, and the Republic of Congo for avoided forest conversion, can help identify win-win sites for implementation. We find that concentrating the implementation of these three conservation strategies in critical places, covering 5.8 million km2 could benefit 2.0 billion people with increased local ecosystem services provision. These critical places cover only 35% of the possible area of implementation but would provide 80% of the benefits that are possible globally for the selected set of ecosystem services under the NBS scenarios examined here. We conclude that targeting these critical places for protection, restoration, and agroforestry interventions will be key to achieving adaptation and human well-being goals while also increasing nature-based carbon mitigation.
README: Data from: Win-wins or trade-offs? Site and strategy determine carbon and local ecosystem service benefits for protection, restoration, and agroforestry
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gjcr
Description of the data and file structure
This data package contains information on seven ecosystem services for three Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) scenarios, as used in McDonald et al. 2024.
Our analysis proceeded in six steps: 1) defining a conceptual framework for ecosystem services and their relationship to adaptation benefits; 2) selecting the input scenarios of conservation action; 3) selecting other key global datasets needed for our analysis; 4) ecosystem service modeling in biophysical terms; 5) calculating and mapping of beneficiaries; and 6) prioritization analysis to select sites for conservation action with high human well-being benefits. Please see the manuscript for details of each step.
Files and variables
File: McDonald_et_al_2024_Data_Dryad.zip
Description: This Zip file contains a summary Excel table and a folder.
Figure1_Carbon_and_population_by_NCS.xlsx = An Excel table containing the information used to build Figure 1 in the paper.
"Cobenefits ES modelling raster layers" = A folder containing information on seven ecosystem services for three NCS scenarios, as used in McDonald et al. 2024.
This is a simplified representation of the data, for use while making maps and summary statistics. This data is the same as is displayed in the Naturebase platform (https://naturebase.org/). Carbon sequestration information (not in this data package) can be downloaded directly from there. For access to the raw (not categorized) ecosystem service data, which is substantially larger in size, please email rob_mcdonald@tnc.org.
Data format:
Each raster layer (in TIF format) represents the change in one ecosystem service (each ecosystem service's raster is contained in a subfolder, labeled with the ecosystem services name) with implementation of one of the NCS scenarios (AFC= Avoided Forest Conversion, Agroforest = Agroforestry, and Reforest = Reforestation), and is represented with a 13-category grid, defined in a consistent way for all ecosystem services and all NCS scenarios. Categories are based off of the percent change in ecosystem service provision from the baseline (2020) provision. Positive is always better, negative is always worse, relative to baseline. There is a zero category (no change), and then 6 negative and 6 positive categories: 1 (0-5%), 2 (5-10%), 3 (10-20%), 4 (20-50%), 5 (50-100%), and 6 (> 100%). Note that for some layers, not all categories are present. For instance, reforestation has a generally negative effect on water runoff, some most pixels are either zero (no change) or -1 (0-5% worse).
Code/software
TIF files can be viewed using any GIS software. The TIF files created in this package were created with ArcGIS Pro.
Methods
Our analysis proceeded in six steps: 1) defining a conceptual framework for ecosystem services and their relationship to adaptation benefits; 2) selecting the input scenarios of conservation action; 3) selecting other key global datasets needed for our analysis; 4) ecosystem service modeling in biophysical terms; 5) calculating and mapping of beneficiaries; and 6) prioritization analysis to select sites for conservation action with high human well-being benefits. Please the journal article for details on each step.
This data package includes the original datasets created by this analysis, in the form of easy-to-use raster maps. Many of the figures in the paper are simple summaries, by country or basin, derived from these rasters.