Perrine Hamel

Nanyang Technological University | ntu · Asian School of the Environment

Ecosystem characteristics and processes provide significant value to human health and well-being, and there is growing interest in quantifying those values. Of particular interest are water-related ecosystem services and the incorporation of their value into local and regional decision-making. This presents multiple challenges and opportunities to...

Ecosystem services (ES) analyses are increasingly used to address societal challenges, but too often are not accompanied by uncertainty assessment. This omission limits the validity of their findings and may undermine the ‘science-based’ decisions they inform. We summarize and analyze seven commonly perceived challenges to conducting uncertainty as...

Urban nature has the potential to improve air and water quality, mitigate flooding, enhance physical and mental health, and promote social and cultural well-being. However, the value of urban ecosystem services remains highly uncertain, especially across the diverse social, ecological and technological contexts represented in cities around the worl...

Investments in watershed services programs hold the promise to protect and restore ecosystems and water resources. The design and implementation of such programs is often accompanied by hydrologic modeling and monitoring, although the role of hydrologic information in meeting the needs of program managers remains unclear. In the Camboriú watershed,...

Understanding the cooling service provided by vegetation in cities is important to inform urban policy and planning. However, the performance of decision-support tools estimating heat mitigation for urban greening strategies has not been evaluated systematically. Here, we further develop a calibration algorithm and evaluate the performance of the u...

Techniques for mapping and quantifying ecosystem services are gaining increased traction in recent years. They include powerful computational and visual tools for representing ecosystem service supply and for facilitating policy, planning, and management decisions. This chapter describes, evaluates, and critiques the tools and approaches for quanti...

Nature-based solutions now form part of the engineering toolbox for water resources. This chapter explores when and how natural infrastructure can provide hydrologic services drawing on the latest research and practice in two fields: ecosystem-service (ES) science and integrated water resources management (IWRM). The chapter introduces the potentia...

Understanding the cooling service provided by vegetation in cities is important to inform urban policy and planning. However, the performance of decision-support tools estimating heat mitigation for urban greening strategies is not systematically evaluated. Here, we develop a calibration algorithm and evaluate the performance of the Urban Cooling m...

Freshwater ecosystems are exceptionally rich in biodiversity and provide essential benefits to people. Yet they are disproportionately threatened compared to terrestrial and marine systems and remain underrepresented in the scenarios and models used for global environmental assessments. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) has recently been proposed...

Freshwater ecosystems are exceptionally rich in biodiversity and provide essential benefits to people. Yet they are disproportionately threatened compared to terrestrial and marine systems and remain underrepresented in the scenarios and models used for global environmental assessments. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) has recently been proposed...

Purpose Despite decades of social science research into disasters, practice in the field continues to be informed largely from a technical perspective. The outcome is often a perpetuation of vulnerability, as narrowly defined technical interventions fail to address or recognize the ethical, historical, political and structural complexities of real-...

Unprecedented urban growth and extensive land use change especially in the Global South has placed increasing pressure on urban ecosystem services (UES). While there are numerous studies modelling and mapping ecosystem services, integrating the outputs of multiple ecosystem service assessments to provide recommendations for nature-based planning re...

Incorporating nature-based recreation into urban planning analyses requires understanding the accessibility, quality, and demand for urban greenspace (UGS) across a city. Here, we present a novel tool that lowers the barriers to such information by (i) providing a spatially-explicit assessment of recreational UGS supply and demand; (ii) differentia...

Globally, rising seas threaten massive numbers of people and significant infrastructure. Adaptation strategies increasingly incorporate nature-based solutions. New science can illuminate where these solutions are appropriate in urban environments and what benefits they provide to people. Together with stakeholders in San Mateo County, California, U...

The technical expertise of the engineering discipline is a dominant input into the information systems and products shaping our knowledge of disaster and climate-change crises. Despite decades of social science research into disasters, policy and practice in the field continues to be informed largely from a technical and data driven perspective. Th...

In Southeast Asia, projections of rapid urban growth coupled with high water-related risks call for large investments in infrastructure—including in blue–green infrastructure (BGI) such as forests, parks, or vegetated engineered systems. However, most of the knowledge on BGI is produced in the global North, overlooking the diversity of urban contex...

There is an emerging consensus that the health of the planet depends on the coexistence between rapidly growing cities and the natural world. One strategy for guiding cities towards sustainability is to facilitate a planning process based on positive visions for urban systems among actors and stakeholders. This paper presents the Urban Nature Futur...

Urban green infrastructure, especially trees, are widely regarded as one of the most effective ways to reduce urban temperatures in heatwaves and alleviate the adverse impacts of extreme heat events on human health and well-being. Nevertheless, urban planners and decision-makers are still lacking methods and tools to spatially evaluate the cooling...

• Rapid urbanization and development in Southeast Asia have impacted its high biodiversity and unique ecosystems, directly through the use of forest lands for infrastructure building, and indirectly through increasing ecological footprints. • In Greater Bandung, Indonesia and Greater Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, rapid urbanization over the last thirty y...

Urban sprawl impacts are critical in the evaluation of planning decisions and often monitored by indicators of soil sealing. In France, these indicators are required by law to be reported in environmental assessments of planning documents. Although monitoring of soil sealing is important to limit environmental impacts, focusing on this sole dimensi...

Undervaluing the protections natural ecosystems provide against flooding has detrimental impacts for society, particularly given the increase in flood hazard in the context of climate and land-use changes. Against this backdrop, we develop a framework to quantify these natural protections, even in settings with limited available data. By applying t...

Nature‐Based Solutions (NBS) are an increasingly popular approach to water resources management, with a growing number of projects designed to take advantage of landscape effects on water flow. As NBS for water are developed, producing hydrologic information to inform decisions often requires substantial investment in data acquisition and modeling;...

Cette évaluation de la prise en compte des services écosystémiques dans les décisions d’aménagement urbain s’inscrit dans le cadre global de l’Évaluation française des écosystèmes et des services écosystémiques (Efese). Elle vise à proposer à l’ensemble des acteurs de l’aménagement urbain une démarche d’évaluation sur laquelle s’appuyer pour intégr...

Globally, cities face massive environmental and societal challenges such as rapid population growth and climate change. In response, natural infrastructure is increasingly recognized for its potential to enhance resilience and improve human well-being. Here, we examine the role of the ecosystem services and resilience approaches in urban planning,...

Natural infrastructure such as parks, forests, street trees, green roofs, and coastal vegetation is central to sustainable urban management. Despite recent progress, it remains challenging for urban decision-makers to incorporate the benefits of natural infrastructure into urban design and planning. Here, we present an approach to support the green...

Mitigating urban heat islands has become an important objective for many cities experiencing heat waves. Despite notable progress, the spatial relationship between land use and/or land cover patterns and the distribution of air temperature remains poorly understood. This article presents a reusable computational workflow to simulate the spatial dis...

Nature underpins human well-being in critical ways, especially in health. Nature provides pollination of nutritious crops, purification of drinking water, protection from floods, and climate security, among other well-studied health benefits. A crucial, yet challenging, research frontier is clarifying how nature promotes physical activity for its m...

ICTs such as mapping platforms, algorithms, and databases are a central component of how society responds to the threats posed by disasters. However, these systems have come under increasing criticism in recent years for prioritizing technical disciplines over insights from the humanities and social science and failing to adequately incorporate the...

Urban blue-green spaces hold immense potential for supporting the sustainability and liveability of cities through the provision of urban ecosystem services (UES). However, research on UES in the Global South has not been reviewed as systematically as in the Global North. In Southeast Asia, the nature and extent of the biases, imbalances and gaps i...

Urban green infrastructure, especially trees, are widely regarded as one of the most effective ways to reducing urban temperatures in extreme heat events, and alleviate its adverse impacts on human health and well-being. Nevertheless, urban planners and decision-makers are still lacking methods and tools to spatially evaluate the cooling effects of...

Mitigating urban heat islands has become an important objective for many cities experiencing heat waves. Despite notable progress, the spatial relationship between land use/land cover patterns and the distribution of air temperature remains poorly understood. This article presents a reusable computational workflow to simulate the spatial distributi...

Information systems increasingly shape our knowledge of crises such as disasters and climate change. While these tools improve our capacity to understand, prepare for, and mitigate such challenges, critical questions are being raised about how their design shapes public imagination of these problems and delimits potential solutions. Prior work in h...

As watershed management programs have become more common globally, so have efforts to support these initiatives through hydrologic modeling and monitoring. However, these efforts are often guided by oversimplified assumptions of how management programs work and the quantity, quality, and type of information needed to support their planning, impleme...

High air temperatures are a public health threat, causing 1300 deaths annually in the United States (US) along with heat-related morbidity and increased electricity consumption for air-conditioning (AC). Increasing tree canopy cover has been proposed as one way to reduce urban air temperatures. Here, we assemble tree cover and developed land-cover...

The future of nature's contributions A recent Global Assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has emphasized the urgent need to determine where and how nature's contribution matters most to people. Chaplin-Kramer et al. have developed a globalscale modeling of ecosystem services, focusing on...

Integrated watershed management allows decision-makers to balance competing objectives, for example agricultural production and protection of water resources. Here, we developed a spatially-explicit approach to support such management in the Cañete watershed, Peru. We modeled the effect of grazing management on three services – livestock production...

Florestas são capazes de filtrar sedimentos, nutrientes e resíduos sólidos, impedindo que cheguem aos cursos d’água. A incorporação da infraestrutura natural — ou infraestrutura verde — nos planos de gestão hídrica pode potencializar a eficiência, o desempenho e a resiliência das estruturas convencionais, reabilitando a paisagem a ofertar água de m...

How restoration could help on water treatment systems - Forest and Water Economics

Quanto a restauração de ecossistemas florestais no Sistema Cantareira poderia poupar em tratamento de água. Ensaio também sobre fluxos hídricos.

Incorporating natural infrastructure into water management plans can cost-effectively improve infrastructure system performance and resilience. This report evaluates how restoring forests as natural infrastructure can complement and safeguard the Cantareira Water Supply System, São Paulo's primary water source. We provide a comprehensive primary an...

A incorporação da infraestrutura natural nos planos de gerenciamento de recursos hídricos pode melhorar o desempenho e a resiliência do sistema de infraestrutura de maneira econômica. Este relatório avalia como a restauração de florestas como infraestrutura natural pode complementar e salvaguardar o Sistema de Abastecimento de Água da Cantareira, a...

We introduce a special issue that aims to simultaneously motivate interest in uncertainty assessment (UA) and reduce the barriers practitioners face in conducting it. The issue, “Demonstrating transparent, feasible, and useful uncertainty assessment in ecosystem services modeling,” responds to findings from a 2016 workshop of academics and practiti...

Ochoa and Urbina-Cardona’s recent review of tools for spatially modeling ecosystem services calls out lack of validation and transparency as key issues that the community needs to address. While important, we argue that some issues they identify as worrisome are a result of how the peer-reviewed literature selectively represents applied and decisio...

This paper establishes a novel approach to estimate monthly and annual direct runoffby combining the curve number method of the Natural Resources Conservation Service with an exponential distribution of rainfall depths. The approach was tested against observed rainfall and runofffor 544 watersheds throughout the contiguous United States. For more t...

In response to increasing pressures on water resources, watershed-services management programs are implemented throughout the tropics. These programs aim to promote land management activities that enhance the quantity and quality of water available to local communities. The success of these programs hinges on our ability to i) understand the impact...

Inclusion of ecosystem services (ES) information into national-scale development and climate adaptation planning has yet to become common practice, despite demand from decision makers. Identifying where ES originate and to whom the benefits flow–under current and future climate conditions–is especially critical in rapidly developing countries, wher...

LULC mapping methods. (DOCX)

InVEST model details and inputs. (DOCX)

Ridge-tillage is an agricultural practice where crops are planted on elevated ridges, with furrows in-between. Ridge-tillage has been shown to significantly reduce erosion from croplands, but data on the presence of ridge-tillage is sparse and challenging to collect at the landscape scale. Thus, water quality models often do not account for ridge-t...

A wide variety of tools aim to support decision making by modelling, mapping and quantifying ecosystem services. If decisions are to be properly informed, the accuracy and potential limitations of these tools must be well understood. However, dedicated studies evaluating ecosystem service models against empirical data are rare, especially over larg...

Hydrologic models are useful to understand the effects of climate and land-use changes on dry-season flows. In practice, there is often a trade-off between simplicity and accuracy, especially when resources for catchment management are scarce. Here, we evaluated the performance of a monthly rainfall-runoff model (dynamic water balance model, DWBM)...

International corporations in an increasingly globalized economy exert a major influence on the planet’s land use and resources through their product design and material sourcing decisions. Many companies use life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate their sustainability, yet commonly-used LCA methodologies lack the spatial resolution and predictive...

Supplementary Figures, Supplementary Tables, Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References

This work presents a set of methods to evaluate the potential effects of landscape changes on water supplies. Potential impacts are a function of the seasonality of precipitation, losses of water to evapotranspiration and deep recharge, the flow-regulating ability of watersheds, and the availability of reservoir storage. For a given reservoir capac...

Geospatial models are commonly used to quantify sediment contributions at the watershed scale. However, the sensitivity of these models to variation in hydrological and geomorphological features, in particular to land use and topography data, remains uncertain. Here, we assessed the performance of one such model, the InVEST sediment delivery model,...

Designing landscapes that can meet human needs, while maintaining functioning ecosystems, is essential for long-term sustainability. To achieve this goal, we must better understand the trade-offs and thresholds in the provision of ecosystem services and economic returns. To this end, we integrate spatially explicit economic and biophysical models t...

Climate change is having a significant impact on ecosystem services, and is likely to become increasingly important as this phenomenon intensifies. Future impacts can be difficult to assess as they often involve long time scales, dynamic systems with high uncertainties, and are typically confounded by other drivers of change. Despite a growing lite...

In many countries, hydropower development is rapidly becoming a focus of green growth policies. This represents a significant opportunity for ecosystem services-based land management that integrates environmental and development goals to benefit the hydropower sector and support economic growth. In this study, we present an approach for targeting e...

Corporations and other multinational institutions are increasingly looking to evaluate their innovation and procurement decisions over a range of environmental criteria, including impacts on ecosystem services according to the spatial configuration of activities on the landscape. We have developed a spatially explicit approach and modeled a hypothe...