http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380013000902

A quantitative approach to evaluating ecosystem servicesAbstract

Ecosystem services are benefits that humans receive from their environment. The amount of research that has been done on the concept of ecosystem services has increased substantially in recent years. However, the concept of ecosystem services has been slow to affect actual land management, economic and policy decisions. We argue that one reason for this lack of application is the disparity of methods to quantify ecosystem services. Much of the current ecosystem service research has been done on valuing ecosystem services, with little work done to quantify them so that they can be used as an end point of watershed management. We propose methods to quantify five provisional and regulatory ecosystem services with inputs related to ecosystem functions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods by applying them to a study watershed and then running three extreme land use scenarios for the watershed: all forested, all urban and all corn. Results show that the methods capture the differences in land use on ecosystem service provision. These methods can be a building block for quantification of the full suite of ecosystem services by incorporating more biophysical models and developing validation methods.

生态系统服务(ES)是人类从环境中得到的利益。近年来关于ES概念研究的数量有了大幅增加。然而，ES概念对实际的土地管理、经济和政策制定的影响一致很缓慢。我们认为缺少应用的原因之一是量化ES的方法不统一。目前已有的大量评估ES的研究很少对ES进行定量分析所以他们可以被用来作为流域管理的终极目标（，感觉原文意思不通顺，不知道怎么翻译好）。我们提出了用和生态系统功能相关的投入量化5个生态系统的提供ES和调节ES的方法。我们通过在一个流域研究证明了该方法的有效性。在该案例中我们假设了该流域的3种极端土地利用情况：完全森林化、完全城镇化和完全种植玉米。案例研究结果显示我们提出的方法证明了土地利用对生态系统服务提供功能的影响。这些方法可以作为通过整合更多生物地理模型和开发验证方法来量化全部ES的基石。