Spatial interactions among ecosystem services in an urbanizing agricultural watershed

Abstract

Understanding spatial distributions, synergies, and tradeoffs of multiple ecosystem services (benefits people derive from ecosystems) remains challenging. We analyzed the supply of 10 ecosystem services for 2006 across a large urbanizing agricultural watershed in the Upper Midwest of the United States, and asked the following: (i) Where are areas of high and low supply of individual ecosystem services, and are these areas spatially concordant across services? (ii) Where on the landscape are the strongest tradeoffs and synergies among ecosystem services located? (iii) For ecosystem service pairs that experience tradeoffs, what distinguishes locations that are "win-win" exceptions from other locations? Spatial patterns of high supply for multiple ecosystem services often were not coincident; locations where six or more services were produced at high levels (upper 20th percentile) occupied only 3.3% of the landscape. Most relationships among ecosystem services were synergies, but tradeoffs occurred between crop production and water quality. Ecosystem services related to water quality and quantity separated into three different groups, indicating that management to sustain freshwater services along with other ecosystem services will not be simple. Despite overall tradeoffs between crop production and water quality, some locations were positive for both, suggesting that tradeoffs are not inevitable everywhere and might be ameliorated in some locations. Overall, we found that different areas of the landscape supplied different suites of ecosystem services, and their lack of spatial concordance suggests the importance of managing over large areas to sustain multiple ecosystem services.hydrologic services | landscape heterogeneity | sustainability | Wisconsin | Yahara Watershed R esearch on ecosystem services-the benefits people obtain from nature-has grown rapidly (1-3), yet understanding of the interactions among multiple ecosystem services across heterogeneous landscapes remains limited (3-5). Ecosystem services may interact in complex ways (6, 7). Synergies arise when multiple services are enhanced simultaneously (4), and tradeoffs occur when the provision of one service is reduced as a consequence of increased use of another (7). Managing spatial relationships among diverse ecosystem services may help to strengthen landscape resilience, but interactions among services and their spatial patterns are not well understood (4). Ecosystem service supply has been mapped at various scales (8-12), and spatial concordance among services has been examined to identify "winwin" opportunities for ecosystem service conservation (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19). However, few studies have dealt simultaneously with tradeoffs and synergies among a suite of ecosystem services (20)(21)(22), and none have done so using spatially explicit analyses. Thus, little is known about where tradeoffs and synergies among ecosystem services are most pronounced. Such information could identify areas of disproportionate importance in a landscape, such as...

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