Mapping and Assessment of Freshwater Ecosystem Services and Values - The Case of Waikato Region

In the Waikato Regional Policy Statement, objective 3.8 states that the council will take an ecosystem service approach to recognise and maintain or enhance fresh water ecosystem services to enable their ongoing contribution to regional wellbeing. Monitoring ecosystem services and socioeconomic and cultural values could enable better management of these resources and so increase the productivity and efficiency of resource use for community wellbeing. This is because the ecosystem service approach to natural resource management, in principle, considers all services to all sectors of a community. To facilitate this approach, tools such as maps and a database of ecosystem services are useful at the level of detail at which policy and management decisions are made. This study characterises the freshwater ecosystems in the region by assessing a sample of water bodies (streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands), their services with economic benefits they provide. The results are being presented in web-maps and the underlying database of the ecosystems, their services and values. The database system allows structured querying, searching and updating of the database as more information becomes available on these ecosystems. The ecological status and health of the ecosystems provide an indication of the services and values of these natural resources using the Millennium Ecosystem and Assessment (MEA) and the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) frameworks. This will help the regional council’s capacity in monitoring the effectiveness of its natural resource management and policies.