FMIPA UI Marine Study Center Provides Insights on Marine and Coastal Ecosystem Valuation Methods

The main functions of coastal ecosystems include as a source of livelihood for communities through the fisheries and tourism sectors and as a carbon sink. The concept of ecosystem services is not a new concept in environmental management and is used as a basis for ecosystem-based management and is an important component in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. So knowledge related to the valuation of coastal ecosystem services is very important for decision makers.

To support academics, practitioners, and decision-makers in the marine and coastal sectors in developing insights and competencies on the importance of the value of marine and coastal ecosystem services, the Center for Marine Studies, FMIPA UI, held an online Coastal Ecosystem Economic Valuation Method Training activity on March 9, 2022.

Head of the Marine Study Center Dr. Riani Widiarti, M.Si. said "The purpose of implementing the activity is to provide general knowledge related to valuation methods that are generally used to assess coastal ecosystem services along with the tools used, especially software for assessing marine and coastal ecosystem services and software for assessing coastal ecosystem habitat conditions."

The training was attended by 80 training participants from academic circles, both lecturers and students, government agencies, marine and coastal environment practitioners, and the general public. Before attending the training, the participants first attended pretest which has been prepared by the organizer.

The resource persons present in this training are experts in the field of marine and coastal economic valuation, and have experience in using marine and coastal ecosystem service assessment software, and assessing the condition of marine and coastal ecosystem habitats.

"The software used in this training to assess marine and coastal ecosystem services is Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), while the software used to assess the condition of marine and coastal ecosystem habitats is Coral Point Cout with excel extension (CPCe) 4.1," said Dr. Riani.

The first material is Introduction to Economic Valuation of Coastal Ecosystems compiled by Dr.rer.nat. Mufti Petala Patria, M.Sc. and presented by Eko Burhannuddin, M.Si., followed by the material on Environmental Services Valuation using InVEST software by Anindita Diah Kusumawardhani, M.Si.

In his material, Dr.rer.nat Mufti P. Patria explained that economic valuation is defined as an effort to monetize the value of an object in the environment, services in the environment, and its natural resources. From a mining perspective, it can be seen through the potential of mining results. Then from the perspective of those who like to vacation, it can be seen through tourism potential. While from a fisheries perspective, it is in the form of the potential of fish obtained. However, in terms of ecosystems, all of these have values ​​that can be combined so that per meter has tourism value and other resource values.

"This material has been used in several conditions for real ecosystem assessments related to events or cases around Indonesia. Reflecting on several countries that already have ecosystem values ​​that are used as regulations and policies, this is somewhat different from Indonesia which has high variations between one region and another," said Eko during a presentation in front of 80 participants.

Through this economic valuation basis, it is hoped that it can encourage equal distribution of economic valuation values ​​in Indonesia or at least create a standard for economic valuation values ​​based on region.

Meanwhile, Anindita explained in her presentation material that the InVEST software uses a model. open-source with four categories, namely Supporting Ecosystem Service, Final Ecosystem Service, Ecosystem Service Analysis, and Supporting Tools, so that this application has very rapid development. InVEST allows decision makers to get the latest information on environmental services and their changes (if there are changes in the ecosystem). InVEST, continued Anindita, is also spatially-explicit model, the input data is mostly spatial data or spatialized tabular data.

"InVEST is a Python base programming. However, the knowledge needed to run InVEST is GIS knowledge," said Anindita.

Furthermore, he revealed that there have been at least 495 publications using InVEST as their base. Asia dominates the distribution of InVEST usage. However, he regretted that in Indonesia itself, only six publications have been produced using InVEST.

"InVEST provides input to decision makers on ecosystem services and when they change. This software can be used to see the current ecosystem and what future scenarios are like," he emphasized.

The presentation session continued, in the third session entitled Analysis of Coral Reef Cover using CpcE 4.1 software as a Basis for Valuation of Coral Reef Ecosystems presented by the first speaker, Eko Burhanudin, M.Si.

“CPCe 4.1 is windows based program to determine coral cover dari Underwater Photo Transecti. CPCe uses spatial random points on transect photos for identification. CPCe is calculated statistically and the results are converted into Microsoft Excel. Other functions of CPCe can be for image calibration and benthic analysis. This software is an alternative to Image J and Sigma Scan Pro which are paid software," Eko explained about the benefits of the CpcE 4.1 application.

"The advantages of CPCe include having a long duration, easy to reconfirm or can be done together, high validation, programmed statistical calculations, and data presentation results are already in Excel format," he continued.

After the presentation, the participants who had previously downloaded the CPCe 4.1 application according to the speaker's instructions were then guided to operate the application directly. Through the application, participants were trained to identify the condition of coral reef ecosystems using the CPCe 4.1 software.

News source : https://sci.ui.ac.id/