I’m popping my head up at the end of three weeks being locked out by Dalhousie to share news of a new ResNet paper published this morning in Ecosystems and People, Proximity, benefit transfer and trade-offs: the limits of ecosystem service assumptions in an anthropogenic rural coastal setting. I led this one but had a strong support team, including postdocs Lara Cornejo and Brooke McWherter, and Masters students Sam Howard and Alex Legault. I’m so pleased with the big picture insight we were able to glean from our relatively low-effort survey question about ecosystem service benefits from dykes, dykelands and tidal wetlands around the Bay of Fundy. Very few benefits were associated with proximity, especially for dykelands and tidal wetlands. Very different ‘hotspot’ patterns showed the limits of benefit transfer practices even within relatively close and homogenous places. Where hotspots don’t exist, for instance for tidal wetlands, this does not mean there is not benefit flow: benefits may simply be more distributed. This suggests proximity is a poor predictor of stakeholdership. And finally, assumptions of trade-offs in converting between landforms may not play out as expected: we saw many people getting the same benefits from dykes, dykelands and tidal wetlands. In the face of managed dyke realignment that converts some former dykeland back to tidal wetland, it is useful to learn that the very different landforms seem to many to belong together. With some exceptions (e.g., food, safety), this means that trade-offs may not be as significant as might otherwise be assumed, especially in places where multifunctionality is desired and the dyke remains contiguous and accessible for transportation.
Small multiple maps of hotspots and coldspots for various landforms and benefits (Figure 2 in Sherren et al., 2025, Ecosystems and People).
