Networking Our Way to Better Ecosystem Service Provision

Academic article

Year of publication: 2016
Journal: Trends in Ecology & Evolution
External websites: Cristin; Doi
Involved from NIVA: Jes Jessen Rasmussen
Contributors: David A. Bohan, Dries Landuyt, Athen Ma, Sarina Macfadyen, Vincent Martinet, François Massol, Greg McInerny, Jose M. Montoya, Christian Mulder, Unai Pascual, Michael J O Pocock, Piran White, Sandrine Blanchemanche, Michael Bonkowski, Vincent Bretagnolle, Christer Brönmark, Lynn Dicks, Alex Dumbrell, Nico Eisenhauer, Nikolai Friberg, Mark O. Gessner, Richard J Gill, Claire Gray, Alison Haughton, Sebastian Ibanez, John Jensen, Erik Jeppesen, Jukka Jokela, Gerard Lacroix, Christian Lannou, Sandra Lavorel, Jean-Franco̧is Le Galliard, Françoise Lescourret, Shanlin Liu, Nicolas Loeuille, Orla McLaughlin, Stephen Muggleton, Joseph Peñuelas, Theodora Petanidou, Sandrine Petit, Francesco Pomati, Dave Raffaeli, Jes Jessen Rasmussen, Alan Raybould, Xavier Reboud, Guy Richard, Christoph Scherber, Stefan Scheu, William J. Sutherland, Alireza Tamaddoni-Nezhad, Cajo ter Braak, Mette Termansen, Murray S A Thompson, Teja Tscharntke, Corinne Vacher, Harm Van der Geest, Winfried Voigt, J Arie Vonk, Xin Zhou, Guy Woodward

Summary

The ecosystem services (EcoS) concept is being used increasingly to attach values to natural systems and the multiple benefits they provide to human societies. Ecosystem processes or functions only become EcoS if they are shown to have social and/or economic value. This should assure an explicit connection between the natural and social sciences, but EcoS approaches have been criticized for retaining little natural science. Preserving the natural, ecological science context within EcoS research is challenging because the multi- ple disciplines involved have very different traditions and vocabularies (common-language challenge) and span many organizational levels and temporal and spatial scales (scale challenge) that define the relevant interacting entities (interaction challenge). We propose a network-based approach to transcend these discipline challenges and place the natural science context at the heart of EcoS research.