We live in a world of diminished ecological diversity. We extract energy, materials, and organisms from nature and modify landscapes at rates that cannot be sustained. These activities have resulted in accelerated rates of extinction, degradation, and loss of ecosystems, and disruption of the natural systems in which our cultures are embedded. The Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) believes...

Exposure to nature yields a wide range of mental health benefits. Improvements in mental health have substantial economic value, through: reduced mental healthcare costs; improved workplace productivity; and reduced costs of antisocial behavior, both public, and private. These economic gains represent an unquantified ecosystem service attributable to conservation. Since most individual people, ...

Ecosystem service assessments have increasingly been used to support environmental management policies, mainly based on biophysical and economic indicators. However, few studies have coped with the social-cultural dimension of ecosystem services, despite being considered a research priority. We examined how ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs emerge from diverging social preferences toward...

Ecosystem service provisions are becoming more frequently used to assess land-use related conflicts in recent decades. This study investigates the current spatial and research information available to quantify ecosystem services relative to forest land-use planning in Ireland. A model is developed using the linear-programming method in Remsoft’s Woodstock platform. This model is applied to two ...

Ecosystem services, the benefits humans derive from ecosystems (table 1), are a subset of ecosystem processes that directly or indirectly support and improve human well-being (Daily 1997). Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1981) are usually credited with introducing the term “ecosystem services,” but recognition of the contribution of nature to human well-being has a much longer history (Mooney and Ehrlich ...

Ecosystem services are supplied by nature but, by definition, are received by people. Ecosystem service assessments, intended to influence the decisions people make regarding their interactions with nature, need to understand how people benefit from different ecosystem services. A critical question is therefore, What determines the distribution of ecosystem service benefits between different se...

The main reason for promoting the concept of ecosystem services lies in its potential to contribute to environmental conservation. Highlighting the benefits derived from ecosystems fosters an understanding of humans' dependence on nature, as users of ecosystem services. However, the act of using ecosystem services may not be environmentally neutral. As with the use of products and services gene...

The valuation of ecosystem services is a complex process as it includes several dimensions (ecological, socio-cultural and economic) and not all of these can be quantified in monetary units. The aim of this paper is to conduct an ecosystem services valuation study for mangroves ecosystems, the results of which can be used to inform governance and management of mangroves. We used an expert-based...

In Western Europe, recreational amenity is presented as an important cultural ecosystem service that, along with other values, helps justify policies to conserve biodiversity. However, whether recreational use by the public is enhanced at protected areas designated for nature conservation is unknown. This is the first study to model outdoor recreation at a national scale, examining habitat pref...