TYPE Original Research PUBLISHED 04 September 2023 DOI 10.3389/fenvs.2023.1214037
OPEN ACCESS EDITED BY
Joel Hoffman, United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), United States REVIEWED BY
Claudia Carvalho-Santos, University of Minho, Portugal Meghan Klasic, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, United States *CORRESPONDENCE
Going with the flow: the supply and demand of sediment retention ecosystem services for the reservoirs in Puerto Rico R. De Jesus Crespo*†, M. Valladares-Castellanos, Volodymyr V. Mihunov and T. H. Douthat† Department of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, United States
R. De Jesus Crespo, rdejesuscrespo1@lsu.edu These authors share first authorship
†
RECEIVED 28 April 2023 ACCEPTED 17 August 2023 PUBLISHED 04 September 2023 CITATION
De Jesus Crespo R, Valladares-Castellanos M, Mihunov VV and Douthat TH (2023), Going with the flow: the supply and demand of sediment retention ecosystem services for the reservoirs in Puerto Rico. Front. Environ. Sci. 11:1214037. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2023.1214037 COPYRIGHT
© 2023 De Jesus Crespo, ValladaresCastellanos, Mihunov and Douthat. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Impounding surface waters in reservoirs is a major mechanism for providing water for human consumption, including potable water, hydroelectric power, and industrial uses. Building reservoirs incurs environmental and social costs, and therefore safeguarding their effectiveness and longevity is a concern of clear public interest. One factor that affects the longevity of reservoirs is sedimentation, a process exacerbated by land use conversion in upstream watershed areas. Despite the economic importance of preventing sedimentation in existing reservoirs, few consumers are aware of the natural features that provide sediment retention services and the relevance of their conservation in their daily lives. Moreover, managing for landscape level sediment retention services is challenging due to a lack of clarity regarding supply and demand flows that transcend watershed boundaries and jurisdictions. Our study seeks to bridge these gaps by characterizing the flow of sediment retention services to reservoirs and link these services to the specific consumers that benefit using a socio-ecological network (SEN) framing. We conducted this study on the island of Puerto Rico (PR), the population of which is heavily reliant on reservoirs as a primary water resource, while experiencing severe and chronic reservoir sedimentation problems. Our study models avoided sediment export, and the costs were averted thanks to this service. We characterized protection as opposed to vulnerability of these sediment retention services by estimating the proportion of natural areas under some form of legal conservation status and the level of landscape fragmentation. We frame these services as an SEN by using water distribution lines as links to estimate the number of beneficiaries and their location relative to the reservoir’s water source. Our results identify watersheds with conservation needs, their beneficiaries, and where within those watersheds to prioritize conservation efforts to safeguard access to clean water in PR. More broadly, our study provides a model case study for establishing supply and demand service flows of water purification services and demonstrating the utility of mapping socio-ecological networks of service flows in order to justify conservation policies based on ecosystem services. KEYWORDS
ecosystem services, sediment retention, reservoirs, socio-ecological networks, Puerto Rico
Frontiers in Environmental Science
01
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