A systematic conservation planning approach to maintaining ecosystem service provision in working landscapes

Abstract

Balancing human well-being with the maintenance of ecosystem services (ES) for future generations has become one of the central sustainability challenges of the 21st century. In working landscapes, past and ongoing production-centered objectives have resulted in the conversion of ecosystems into simple land-use types, which has also altered the provision of most ES. These inevitable trade-offs between the efficient production of individual provisioning ES and the maintenance of regulating and cultural ES call for the development of a land-use strategy based on the multifunctional use of the landscape. Due to the heterogeneous nature of working landscapes, both protection and restoration actions are needed to improve their multifunctionality. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) offers a decision support framework that can support landscape multifunctionality by indicating where ES management efforts should be implemented. We describe an approach that we developed to include ES provision protection and restoration objectives in SCP with the goal of providing ongoing benefits to society. We explain the general framework of this approach and discuss concepts, challenges, innovations, and prospects for the further development of a comprehensive decision support tool. We illustrate our approach with two case studies implemented in the pan-Canadian project ResNet.

Finding the Green Grass in the Haystack? Integrated National Assessment of Ecosystem Services and Condition in Hungary, in Support of Conservation and Planning

“…Meeting these targets will require allocating nature restoration and conservation actions with the highest benefits but lowest costs on society, and thus must be based on the best available scientific evidence. A promising strategy for the highest benefit is to simultaneously consider biodiversity and ecosystem services hotspots as well as the socio-economic drivers behind them [7,8].…”