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The ARIES project
ARIES (Assessment and Research Infrastructure for Ecosystem Services) is an National Science Foundation project that will build infrastructure to assist decision-makers and researchers through all phases of ecosystem service assessment and valuation (ESAV). It follows our Ecosystem Services Database project and will support high-relevance case studies in collaboration with leading non-governmental organizations: Conservation International and Earth Economics as part of an expanding partnership.
Goals
These are the main goals of the ARIES project, which starts on March 1st, 2007 and will continue for the next three years.
Ensure that ecosystem services and their immediate and projected values are taken into account properly and fairly in worldwide policy-making. This is the primary aim of the project. Ecosystem Services Valuation is a process that defies conventional validation and entails huge economic interests, allowing, if not done transparently, worrisome margins for malicious use. It is of paramount importance that all applicable factors are accounted for in Ecosystem Services studies. ARIES will facilitate the practice of ESAAV for government policy makers, NGOs, consultants and companies and help guarantee trustworthiness of the results of valuation through full transparency of data and methods. The use of ARIES will remain open and free for all governmental, institutional and academic users. Non-online versions will be made available on CD for network-challenged locations. The entire infrastructure will be distributed under the open source General Public License.
Secure the continuity of the ESD project and community, and complement it with the interfaces, knowledge and algorithms necessary to assist a decision maker in estimating and forecasting ecosystem services provision and the correspondent range of economic values in a specified area. ARIES will support ES assessment from the retrieval of data comparable with an area of interest, through the assessment of the component of ES value pertaining to the context identified, to the estimation of the correspondent economic values. It will be designed to facilitate the task of real-world actors and to ensure that key factors are considered, estimates are defensible, and available information is taken into account.
Contribute significantly to social well-being and environmental protection in both developed (Puget Sound) and underdeveloped (Madagascar, Mexico) contexts by supporting high-relevance, ongoing case studies and using them to populate, test and validate the framework. In order to ensure proper focus and maximal usefulness, we have partnered with key practitioners of ESAV in the areas of biodiversity, ecosystem health and policy-making. This project reflects a one-year, first-hand analysis of the needs of ESAV practitioners, and is developed through high impact case studies chosen to maximize broader impact and coverage of the problem area.
Build the initial momentum for a longer-lived, independently funded initiative or NGO dedicated to serving society by supporting transparent and fair ESAV. The partnership and initiatives enabled by this proposal have aims that extend beyond the requested funding period [34].
In addition to this, ARIES will expand the data resources and consolidate the infrastructural backbone of the nascent semantic web of natural systems sciences enabled by projects like SEEK [30] and GEON [31]. ARIES will expand the scope of these activities to encompass ecological economics and sustainability, and promote new analytical paradigms focused on the higher organizational level of coupled human-natural systems.
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