Building value in environmental monitoring for more informed decision-making about trade-offs between ecosystem services and disservices from nature-based solutions

Summary

Society increasingly expects that food will be produced in a sustainable, climate-smart manner. Nature based solutions (NBS), including ponds and constructed wetlands are widely promoted by researchers as a class of measures promoting healthy agricultural landscapes. However, a range of trade-offs associated with NBS influence practitioner’s decisions about their implementation and use. Making the right decisions about NBS requires, amongst other things, access to data from environmental monitoring programmes. The value of monitoring programmes depends on how well the data they collect and curate can be used to support decision-making. Here, we present a conceptual framework for assessing the value of monitoring programmes based on the relevance of the data they collect to decision maker needs, their overall running costs and their levels of uncertainty in characterizing the state of the environment. We demonstrate how our proposed framework can be used to assess the value of a range of monitoring programmes for quantifying trade-offs between nutrient load reduction and climate impacts from artificial wetlands in agricultural landscapes.