More about
ASSESSING BENEFITS AND COSTS
Natural infrastructure (NI) provides communities with a broad array of economic, environmental and social benefits. Improved approaches are needed to evaluate, quantify and forecast these benefits to support planning and decision making
Developing tools
The research done to better evaluate, quantify and forecast benefits will be incorporated into toolboxes that will support practitioners, researchers and educators in making decisions that factor in the layered benefits of NI projects
Maximizing ni benefits
What scale of NI is best for ecosystem functioning? And what spatial arrangement improves ecosystem outcomes to the greatest extent? This research will examine how individual projects are embedded within larger spatial scales that can enhance or diminish large-scale outcomes
Understanding ecological benefits
One perceived benefit of NI is improved ecological outcomes, which in turn can have social and economic benefits. This research examines animal response as a useful metric to gauge value within NI systems, which will ensure that outcomes such as habitat for foraging and sheltering are fulfilled
Characterizing ni projects
One goal is to track and characterize NI projects to understand how organizations consider costs and benefits to project components, and efficiency in measuring and estimating net benefits.