Mapping Cultural Ecosystem Services Enables Better Informed Nature Protection and Landscape Management

Rethinking ecosystem services to better address and navigate cultural values

Management objectives for the protection of ecosystem services

People find themselves confronted with ever starker tradeoffs in the allocation of resources to competing uses and users. At the local level, for instance, allocation of land or water to agricultural, industrial, municipal, recreational, and conservation activities often involves a zero sum game. This is apparent in the widespread loss of water and land from native habitat to farms and increasi...

Embedding ecosystem services in coastal planning leads to better outcomes for people and nature.

Recent calls for ocean planning envision informed management of social and ecological systems to sustain delivery of ecosystem services to people. However, until now, no coastal and marine planning process has applied an ecosystem-services framework to understand how human activities affect the flow of benefits, to create scenarios, and to design a management plan. We developed models that quan...

Multiple ecosystem services in a working landscape

Policy makers and practitioners are in need of useful tools and models for assessing ecosystem service outcomes and the potential risks and opportunities of ecosystem management options. We utilize a state-and-transition model framework integrating dynamic soil and vegetation properties to examine multiple ecosystem services-specifically agricultural production, biodiversity and habitat, and so...

Redefining Landscape Structure for Ecosystem Services

Our understanding of the effects of landscape structure on ecosystem services (ES) remains at a very early stage, despite a large body of literature on the effects of the composition and configuration of natural land cover on some ES. Here, I argue that a comprehensive understanding of the effects of landscape structure on ES requires us to reconsider what constitutes landscape structure for ES...