Zach Ancona
Science and Products
Accounting for land in the United States: Integrating physical land cover, land use, and monetary valuation
Land plays a critical role in both economic and environmental accounting. As an asset, it occupies a unique position at the intersection of the System of National Accounts (SNA), the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Central Framework (SEEA-CF), and (as a spatial unit) SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EEA), making land a...
Wentland, Scott A.; Ancona, Zachary H.; Bagstad, Kenneth J.; Boyd, James W.; Hass, Julie L.; Gindelsky, Marina; Moulton, Jeremy G. Integrating physical and economic data into experimental water accounts for the United States: Lessons and opportunities
Water management increasingly involves tradeoffs, making its accounting highly relevant in our interconnected world. Physical and economic data about water in many nations are becoming more widely integrated through application of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounts for Water (SEEA-Water), which enables the tracking of linkages between...
Bagstad, Kenneth J.; Ancona, Zachary H.; Hass, Julie L.; Glynn, Pierre D.; Wentland, Scott; Vardon, Michael; Fay, John P. Reducing water scarcity by improving water productivity in the United States
Nearly one-sixth of U.S. river basins are unable to consistently meet societal water demands while also providing sufficient water for the environment. Water scarcity is expected to intensify and spread as populations increase, new water demands emerge, and climate changes. Improving water productivity by meeting realistic benchmarks for all water...
Marston, Landon; Lamsal, Gambhir; Ancona, Zachary H.; Caldwell, Peter V; Richter, Brian; Ruddell, Benjamin; Rushforth, Richard; Davis, Kyle F. A rasterized building footprint dataset for the United States
Microsoft released a U.S.-wide vector building dataset in 2018. Although the vector building layers provide relatively accurate geometries, their use in large-extent geospatial analysis comes at a high computational cost. We used High-Performance Computing (HPC) to develop an algorithm that calculates six summary values for each cell in a raster...
Pourpeikari Heris, Mehdi; Foks, Nathan Leon; Bagstad, Kenneth J.; Troy, Austin; Ancona, Zachary H.
Sustaining Environmental Capital Initiative summary report
Federal agencies need credible scientific information to determine the production and value of ecosystem services in an efficient and timely manner. The U.S. Geological Survey addresses this scientific information need through the Sustaining Environmental Capital Initiative project. The project has relied on U.S. Geological Survey expertise...
Huber, Christopher; Meldrum, James R.; Schuster, Rudy M.; Ancona, Zachary H.; Bagstad, Kenneth J.; Beck, Scott M.; Carlisle, Daren; Claggett, Peter R.; Franco, Fabiano; Galbraith, Heather S.; Haefele, Michelle; Hoelting, Kristin R; Hogan, Dianna M.; Hopkins, Kristina G.; Kern, Tim; Lawrence, Collin B.; Lischka, Stacy; Loomis, John B.; Mueller, Julie M.; Noe, Gregory B.; Pindilli, Emily J.; Quay, Brian; Semmens, Darius J.; Sinclair, Wilson; Spooner, Daniel E.; Voigt, Brian; St. John White, Barabara Toward ecosystem accounts for Rwanda: Tracking 25 years of change in potential supply and flows of ecosystem services
1. Rwanda, a small but rapidly developing central African nation, has undertaken development of natural capital accounts to better inform its economic development through the World Bank’s Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) Partnership. In this paper, we develop ecosystem service (ES) models to quantify the physical...
Bagstad, Kenneth J.; Ingram, Jane Carter; Lange, Glenn-Marie; Masozera, Michel K.; Ancona, Zachary H.; Bana, Mediatrice; Kabogo, Desire; Musana, Bernard; Nabahungu, Nsharwasi Leon; Rukundo, Emmanuel; Rutebuka, Evariste; Polasky, Stephen; Rugege, Denis; Uwera, Claudine Using social-context matching to improve spatial function-transfer performance for cultural ecosystem service models
Recreational and aesthetic enjoyment of public lands is increasing across a wide range of activities, highlighting the need to assess and adapt management to accommodate these uses. Despite a growing number of studies on mapping cultural ecosystem services, most are local-scale assessments that rely on costly and time-consuming primary data...
Semmens, Darius J.; Sherrouse, Benson C.; Ancona, Zachary H. Monarch habitat as a component of multifunctional landscape restoration using continuous riparian buffers
Stabilizing the eastern, migratory population of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) is expected to require substantial habitat restoration on agricultural land in the core breeding area of the Upper Midwestern U.S. Previous research has considered the potential to utilize marginal land for this purpose because of its low productivity, erodible...
Semmens, Darius J.; Ancona, Zachary H. The sensitivity of ecosystem service models to choices of input data and spatial resolution
Although ecosystem service (ES) modeling has progressed rapidly in the last 10–15 years, comparative studies on data and model selection effects have become more common only recently. Such studies have drawn mixed conclusions about whether different data and model choices yield divergent results. In this study, we compared the results of different...
Bagstad, Kenneth J.; Cohen, Erika; Ancona, Zachary H.; McNulty, Steven; Sun, Ge Analyzing land-use change scenarios for trade-offs among culturalecosystem services in the Southern Rocky Mountains
Significant increases in outdoor recreation participants are projected over the next 50 years for national forests across the United States, with even larger increases possible for forests located in the Southern Rocky Mountains. Forest managers will be challenged to balance increasing demand for outdoor recreation with other ecosystem services....
Sherrouse, Benson C.; Semmens, Darius J.; Ancona, Zachary H.; Brunner, Nicole M. Evaluating alternative methods for biophysical and cultural ecosystem services hotspot mapping in natural resource planning
Context Data for biophysically modeled and Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS)-derived cultural ecosystem services have potential to identify natural resource management synergies and conflicts, but have rarely been combined. Ecosystem service hot/coldspots generated using different methods vary in their spatial extent and connectivity, with...
Bagstad, Kenneth J.; Semmens, Darius J.; Ancona, Zachary H.; Sherrouse, Benson C.
Social-value maps for Arapaho, Roosevelt, Medicine Bow, Routt, and White River National Forests, Colorado and Wyoming
Executive SummaryThe continued pressures of population growth on the life-sustaining, economic, and cultural ecosystem services provided by our national forests, particularly those located near rapidly growing urban areas, present ongoing challenges to forest managers. Achieving an effective assessment of these ecosystem services includes a proper...
Ancona, Zachary H.; Semmens, Darius J.; Sherrouse, Benson C.