Abstract | Wetlands for people and place: Developing a blueprint for ecosystem service restoration in wetlands

As some of the most globally important ecosystems, wetlands provide people with a wide range of ecosystem services, including water purification, carbon storage, and opportunities for recreation and sustainable harvest. Despite their importance, many wetlands are degraded or at risk, due to widespread drainage for agriculture and urban development, among other factors. Many communities are motivated to restore valuable wetlands, yet progress towards wetland restoration for ecosystem services is limited by the lack of prototypes. Such restoration prototypes need to incorporate multi-scale biophysical and social data to effectively account for the wide range of processes which produce ecosystem services. The wetlands in the Wairarapa valley are part of the largest wetland complex in the southern part of New Zealand’s North Island. Highly modified for agricultural production, their strategic location and cultural value have inspired local communities to restore their historically abundant ecosystem services. Amalgamating and building on Wairarapa wetland case studies, we synthesize past and ongoing records of restoration efforts using biophysical and participatory approaches. Our goal is to provide tools to empower communities to restore wetlands. We ask two main questions:

1. What are the potential synergies in wetland ecosystem services under different restoration scenarios?
2. How do differing restoration strategies benefit different user groups?

Our approach, which incorporates both biophysical and social perspectives of ecosystem services, aims to map outcomes of wetland restoration on ecosystem service supply and demand, acknowledging and revealing the diversity of beneficiaries who rely on the wide-range of wetland ecosystem services and empowering local people to make decisions about wetland restoration.

Bio | Dr Stephanie Tomscha

Stephanie Tomscha is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Biodiversity and Restoration Ecology at Victoria University of Wellington. She received her PhD at the University of British Columbia, Department of Forest Sciences and was most recently a visiting postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. Tomscha has been part of several interdisciplinary research networks including the Centre for International Forestry Research as well as the Canadian Network of Aquatic Ecosystem Services. She is interested in links between nature and human well-being, known as ecosystem services. Specializing in mapping trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services, her work adopts diverse datasets and approaches ranging from participatory mapping and household surveys to biophysical mapping and modeling using contemporary and historical aerial photography. Much of her work has focused on ecosystem services at the interface of aquatic and terrestrial systems due to their disproportionate use by people. She is especially interested in the legacies of ecosystem service management including the legacies of environmental inequities.