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 innovations in frameworks for integrating science, understanding of ecosystems and human benefits, and innovations in tools for the modeling of services. In this article, we review efforts to characterize changes in marine ecosystem services, including recent advances, and we propose five key future directions for research: cultural values, qualitative or semi-quantitative modeling approaches, cumulative impacts, model evaluation, and markets.