Marine ecosystem services

Characterizing changes in marine ecosystem services

The benefits of marine ecosystems for people are increasingly being characterized through the concept of ecosystem services, with the promise to aid decision making from marine spatial planning to ecosystem-based management. The characterization of changes in marine ecosystem services is central to the application of ecological science to policy contexts, and this field is quickly evolving with...

Evaluating tradeoffs among ecosystem services to inform marine spatial planning

A central challenge for natural resource management is developing rigorous yet practical approaches for balancing the costs and benefits of diverse human uses of ecosystems. Economic theory has a long history of evaluating tradeoffs in returns from different assets to identify optimal investment strategies. There has been recent progress applying this framework to the delivery of ecosystem serv...

Coastal and Marine Ecosystem Services Valuation for Policy and Management

Marine biodiversity and ecosystem services: an elusive link.

Efforts to test the hypothesised positive link between ecosystem services and functions and biodiversity are increasing in order to forecast the consequences of the present erosion of biodiversity on ecosystem functions and to provide an additional basis for the conservation of biodiversity. These efforts have been, however, modest in marine ecosystems. An examination of seagrass communities, w...

Managing for ocean biodiversity to sustain marine ecosystem services

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America C evidence is accumulating from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems to suggest that sustainable ecosystem services depend upon a diverse biota (Daily et al. 1997; Loreau et al. 2001; Tilman et al. 2001; Wall et al. 2004; MA 2005; Sala and Knowlton 2006; Worm et al. 2006; Butler et al. 2007; Hector and Bagchi 2007). In princi...