Integrating Ecosystem Services into a Prioritization Model for Surf Protected Areas

This project evaluated potential and priority locations for the establishment of Surf Protected Areas (SPAs) along the entire coastline of Brazil. To conduct this assessment, we 1) assessed the quality of Brazilian surf breaks using the established Surf Conservation Index (SCI) developed by the Save the Waves, a member of the Surf Conservation Partnership (SCP), and 2) expanded the SCI with the addition of two key ecosystem service assessments for mangrove carbon storage and coastal protection. This assessment created a list of top surf spots for priority conservation based on a ranking system including aspects such as wave quality, biodiversity, social, and economic significance. The addition of the ecosystem service assessment suggests that surf ecosystems in Brazil provide significant carbon storage and coastal protection and changed which sites were considered the highest priority for conservation. This result has significant implications for the management of surf resources. Additionally, we conducted a review of existing surf conservation projects to distill good practices in the field of surf conservation and management. Surfing will likely continue to be leveraged as a vehicle for conservation in the future; understanding broader implications of this work and developing clear guidelines is key for scaling up programs like the SCP. 

Methods
For this project, we completed a Surf Conservation Index study to help the Surf Conservation Partnership prioritize surf breaks in Brazil for conservation. The Surf Conservation Partnership seeks to protect breaks that have low anthropogenic pressure, high biodiversity, high quality surf, high reliance on surf tourism, and existing environmental protections in place. We used a Pressure-State-Response framework to analyze many publicly available spatial data sets and give each surf break a score that quantifies its conservation priority. We also added a Climate Index to the Surf Conservation Index, which estimates the amount of two ecosystem services provided by each break, specifically mangrove carbon storage and coastal protection provided by natural habitats. To assess mangrove carbon storage, we combined a raster of aboveground mangrove biomass with a raster of mangrove soil organic carbon and estimated belowground biomass as a fraction of aboveground biomass to produce an estimate of total carbon storage for each raster cell of mangrove forest. To assess coastal protection, we used the InVEST Coastal Vulnerability model which utilizes many different geophysical data to calculate the exposure of shorepoints along the coast and determine the role of natural habitats in reducing that exposure. These ecosystem service assessments helped further prioritize breaks that provide these services along with all other considerations in the Surf Conservation Index. See full report for results and more detailed methodology.