Proposing new pathways to improve ecosystem service accounting

Ecosystem services are all the benefits provided to humans by natural systems. These can take many forms ranging from the direct extraction of products, such as wood and timber, to regulating effects such as carbon sequestration and erosion prevention.

With natural systems more and more at risk in light of climate change and biodiversity extinctions, managing these systems in a sustainable way is essential to guarantee these services through time.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

Simulation models have become essential tools to support decision-making for natural systems management. While these models have proven useful, some improvements are much needed to better represent the complexity of ecosystem services, notably due to their interactions among each other and with humans.

Indeed, these models tend to overlook the complex interactions that exist between ecosystem services, such as thresholds and feedback effects, that can lead to unintended consequences in response to human actions on the landscape. They also tend to overlook where ecosystem services are realized, and thus which human communities benefit from these services possibly leading to management decisions that can negatively impact the well-being of people in the system.

In this study, we review the state of the art of models focusing on where ecosystem services are provisioned (supply) and where they are needed (demand). We then identify key future steps to increase the robustness of these tools for decision-support regarding ecosystem service interactions and flows to humans.

To illustrate why these concepts are essential, we build upon the social–ecological systems framework, a well-known framework used to conceptualize natural systems where humans and nature interact. We use a simplified case study focusing on the impacts of sea otter conservation on different ecosystem services in British Columbia to propose how to highlight the necessity of our key concepts to better support future management of coupled human and natural systems.

Finally, we make recommendations on how our suggestions can be achieved within future studies, facilitated mostly by constant technological advances, mostly through computing power, the increasing availability of data, and the advances of social sciences facilitating the connection between scientists and local actors.

Read the paper — Next steps for ecosystem service models: integrating complex interactions and beneficiaries by Hugo Thierry, Lael Parrott, and Brian Robinson.