A Mathematical Approach to Understanding Ecosystem Services

October 8 2009

Speaker: Eli Fenichel

Title: A Mathematical Approach to Understanding Ecosystem Services

Abstract: An emerging paradigm in ecology and economics is the concept of ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are processes that generate benefits to people via ecological production. Colin Clarks’ mathematical bioeconomics framework can be expanded to understand the nature and value of ecosystem services. I demonstrate how optimal control theory is useful in bridging ecological and economic concepts to aid in analyzing tradeoffs and values related to ecosystem services. I will discuss examples from recent work and highlight some of the challenging issues in applying optimal control to increasingly realistic ecosystem service models.