Earth Lab EDS Seminar Series: Dr. Ken Bagstad, USGS, Using big data to measure nature's benefits to the economy through natural capital accounting

Title: Using big data to measure nature's benefits to the economy through natural capital accounting

Speaker: Dr. Ken Bagstad, USGS Geosciences & Environmental Change Science Center.

Abstract: 
In April 2022, the Biden Administration committed the U.S. to the production of natural capital accounts, which track stocks and flows of natural resources, ecosystems, and ecosystem services and their interactions with the Nation's economy. Such accounts are critical to addressing a wide range of 21st-century challenges at the intersection of the environment and economy. A variety of Federal agencies and non-governmental collaborators are now working to create the Nation's first set of natural capital accounts. This presentation will introduce the concept of natural capital accounting and its application in the U.S. and discuss the role of big data and data science in building state-of-the-art accounts, in order to foster discussion around the role of ecologists and data scientists in supporting natural capital accounting.

Speaker Bio: 
Dr. Ken Bagstad is a Research Economist working with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geosciences & Environmental Change Science Center. He has advised various national efforts to build and apply natural capital accounts, through work with the World Bank and as USGS lead for the United States' natural capital accounting program. He also worked with the U.N. on development of the SEEA EA statistical standard for natural capital accounting and the creation of the ARIES for SEEA tool to support its global implementation. Through his work on ARIES, Ken has a long-standing interest in the use of artificial intelligence, particularly semantics and machine reasoning, to make scientific data and models interoperable and reusable by both people and computers.