Land management and natural resource public policy decision-making in the United States increasingly relies on two resource damage/recovery paradigms: ecosystem service (ES) and critical load (CL). One well known example that is appropriate for ES and CL evaluation is the acidification of soil and drainage water by atmospheric deposition of acidifying sulfur (S) and nitrogen (N) compounds. The basic principles of ES and CL are common, however, to a variety of air, soil, and water pollution and human land use issues. Virtually no previous effort has combined the ES and CL approaches into an overall framework that clearly documents the impacts of pollution on the environmental goods and services that benefit humans in a way that facilitates land management and public policy decision-making. In this project, E&S developed an integrated approach to the application of ES and CL principles for public land management and natural resource policy decision-making to facilitate adoption of an integrated ES/CL framework that is useful at the environmental science/policy interface. E&S research helped to more closely tie these paradigms together in a way that facilitates the provision of benefits to humans from the use and enjoyment of nature’s by-products. The purpose of the E&S research was to make these connections more explicit. Project completion date was 2012. An agency report and a scientific journal article were produced.
