Research on ecosystem services has grown markedly in recent years. However, few studies are embedded in a social process designed to ensure effective management of ecosystem services. Most research has focused only on biophysical and valuation assessments of putative services. As a mission-oriented discipline, ecosystem service research should be user-inspired and user-useful, which will requir...

The ecosystem approach--as endorsed by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB) in 2000-is a strategy for holistic, sustainable, and equitable natural resource management, to be implemented via the 12 Malawi Principles. These principles describe the need to manage nature in terms of dynamic ecosystems, while fully engaging with local peoples. It is an ambitious concept. Today, the term is c...

Assessment of the historical, present, and future states of marine ecosystems and the effects that humans and climate have on the state of an ecosystem are crucial to the scientific advice required to implement an ecosystem-based fishery management system. Management of federal groundfish fisheries in Alaska considers not just the target fishery, but also the possible impact those fisheries mig...

In many parts of the world forest disturbance regimes have intensified recently, and future climatic changes are expected to amplify this development further in the coming decades. These changes are increasingly challenging the main objectives of forest ecosystem management, which are to provide ecosystem services sustainably to society and maintain the biological diversity of forests. Yet a co...

Coordinating decisions and actions among interacting sectors is a critical component of ecosystem-based management, but uncertainty about coordinated management's effects is compromising its perceived value and use. We constructed an analytical framework for explicitly calculating how coordination affects management decisions, ecosystem state and the provision of ecosystem services in relation ...

Recent calls for the development of ecosystem-based fisheries management compel the development of resource management tools and linkages between existing fisheries management tools and other resource tools to enable assessment and management of multiple impacts on fisheries resources. In this paper, we describe the use of the Chesapeake Bay Fisheries Ecosystem Model (CBFEM), developed using th...

Perspective A series of prominent and controversial papers about the state of marine ecosystems has occupied the pages of high-profile journals over the last decade [1–7]. While some might quarrel with the specific conclusions of these papers, there is no dispute that managers of ocean and coastal habitats confront a growing diversity of very serious challenges [8] that, if left unattended, thr...