Understanding and mitigating impacts of unconventional oil and gas development on land-use and ecosystem services in the U.S.

Unconventional oil and gas development has expanded dramatically in the United States during the last 15 years. This change in the energy industry has developed, modified, and fragmented large areas of the terrestrial landscape, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of annual ecosystem services costs, including negative effects on agricultural production, plant and wildlife populations, animal migrations, and human well-being. The locations of the most active unconventional oil and gas regions overlap ecologically valuable and, in some cases, relatively intact natural habitats, but there are few detailed studies that comprehensively investigate local ecosystem services impacts of this recent activity. We highlight impacts on the terrestrial landscape in three areas of the U.S. that deserve particular attention: the eastern temperate deciduous forest of the mid-Appalachian region, the prairies of the Great Plains, and the Chihuahuan Desert of west Texas and southern New Mexico. These regions cover large geographic areas that are rich in ecosystem services, and recently they have experienced some of the highest levels of unconventional oil and gas activity. We make a call for targeted studies to improve our understanding of how this development will impact these ecosystem services and which strategies can mitigate the negative impacts. The lessons learned from these analyses could be applied to new energy development abroad, which is currently under consideration by many nations with probable unconventional oil and gas resources.