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Jane Carter Ingram

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"The nation's economic accounts provide objective, regular, and standardized information routinely relied on by public and private decision-makers. But they are incomplete. The United States and many other nations currently do not account for the natural capital--such as the wildlife, forests, grasslands, soils, and water bodies--on which all other economic activity rests. By creating formal natural capital accounts (NCA) and ecosystem goods and service (EGSA) accounts, governments and businesses could better understand the past, peer into the future, innovate, conserve, and plan for environmental shocks. They would standardize, regularly repeat, and aggregate diverse natural resource, environmental, and social...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Accounting for U.S. ecosystem services at national and subnational scales
Ecosystem services - the benefits that nature provides to society and the economy - are gaining increasing traction worldwide as governments and the private sector use them to monitor integrated environmental and economic trends. When they are well understood and managed, ecosystems can provide these long-term benefits to people - such as clean air and water, flood control, crop pollination, and recreational, cultural, and aesthetic benefits. Within the U.S. government, a memo issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality in October 2015 charged agencies with incorporating these values in planning, investment, and regulatory processes. Natural capital accounting - a tool being used in dozens of countries...
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Total recreational birding activity (by state and year) estimated by the National Survey for Fishing, Hunting, and WIldlife-Associated Recreation was spatially distributed using birding observations reported through the eBird citizen science database and summarized by land cover type for each analysis year (2001, 2006, and 2011).
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Data Release for Testing ecosystem accounting in the United States: A case study for the Southeast
Note: this version has been superseded by version 2.0: Warnell, K., Boos, E., and Olander, L.P., 2020, Testing ecosystem accounting in the United States: A case study for the Southeast - 2022 Updates (version 2.0, February 2023): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9VET1YX. Ecosystems benefit people in many ways, but these contributions do not appear in traditional national or corporate accounts so are often left out of policy- and decision-making. Ecosystem accounts, as formalized by the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Experimental Ecosystem Accounts (SEEA EEA), track the extent and condition of ecosystem assets and the flows of ecosystem services they provide to people...
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Ecosystem accounts link national-scale environmental and economic trends, offering an internationally standardized approach to tracking sustainability. We compile ecosystem accounts for Rwanda over a 25-year period, and demonstrate that despite strong economic growth, social development, and high-level commitment to environmental goals, ecosystem services fundamental to Rwanda's well-being have declined substantially during this period. Conversion of forests and other natural ecosystems to cropland are the primary drivers of these trends. Ecosystem accounts are particularly important for tracking sustainability in African nations with high levels of economic and population growth and rapid environmental change....
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