Guide for Valuing Marine Ecosystem Services to Support Nearshore Management in Oregon

This guide offers a step-by-step “how to” on the application of specific economic methods to the evaluation of tradeoffs inherent in nearshore management decisions. Specifically, it describes a community-based approach that merges ecological and economic models to generate a survey-based tradeoff exercise that allows for a single set of marine ecosystem services to be valued by local stakeholders and measured by marine researchers, thus connecting social and environmental monitoring efforts. This guide also documents a real-world implementation of the approach in which researchers from Oregon State University examined stakeholders’ values for ecosystem services delivered by marine ecosystems in Oregon.