Kate Sherren

I have never had two papers out on the same day, I don’t think. But if I did, I doubt those two announcements turned up as subsequent emails in my inbox. But that is what happened today. At 11:16 am I received word that PDF Elson Galang’s first Dal-affiliated paper was published in Canadian Geographies, a viewpoint called The Agricultural Heritage System framework for collaborative environmental governance: A case for the Bay of Fundy’s dykelands and foreshore marshes. This was followed by an email with the exact same 11:16 timestamp, telling me that former visiting PhD student Qiqi Zhao’s long-awaited paper in Land Use Policy was published, a paper based on her work in China called Exploring the influence of future land use changes on the cultural ecosystem services in a fast-developing region. These papers could hardly be more different in terms of method but have substantive alignment. The first is a conceptual piece about the complementarity of the dykeland and foreshore marsh landscapes in the Bay of Fundy region, and how the Agricultural Heritage System framework can help us manage it for its diverse values (see below). This encourages conversations about synergies rather than a focus on trade-offs (though we’ve done plenty of trade-off research in ResNet). The second paper is a modelling-heavy analysis of cultural ecosystem service (CES) supply in Nanjing under a range of urbanization scenarios, which involves a lot of consideration of trade-offs. However, all CES were maximized in the Nanjing case under the ecological protection scenario. Congratulations to Elson and Qiqi, and their respective teams.

Conceptual diagram recasting the Bay of Fundy’s dykelands and foreshore marshes as a complementary landscape and as an agricultural heritage system.

In ES terms complementarity (as we recently coined here) is distinct from multifunctionality. Multifunctionality in the ecosystem services literature describes situations where one ecosystem or landscape type provides a range of benefits, i.e., provides many functions. When a landscape is seen to have a primary purpose these other benefits are often called co-benefits, for instance recreation co-benefits provided by a protective dykes. Sometimes the set of services that tend to occur together this way might be called a bundle. But what we have been seeing in the dykeland system is that it is the three landscapes–dykelands, dykes and foreshore tidal wetlands–that seem to form a bundle to provide services together, particularly CES. This is how complementarity manifests, when value is not simply an aggregate of services from individual landscapes, but benefits that arise from perceiving landscape elements as a whole gestalt landscape that elements may not produce. Modelling work like that in the second paper often doesn’t tend to address things like the importance of adjacency of landscapes and the idea that services may emerge from combinations that do not occur when those landscapes are in isolation. However, if the CES delivery was optimized for Nanjing under a restoration scenario, perhaps there is a seed of complementarity emerging there as well, but it would require additional modelling work including adjacency to say for sure.