Both the predictable and unpredictable costs associated with ecosystem management decisions cause problems for economies and human well-being around the world. Globally, humans have increased the supply of provisioning ecosystem services, such as food and timber, at the cost of regulating ecosystem services, such climate regulation and flood protection, potentially undermining the sustainable supply of all ecosystem services. Recent articles have called for more research into understanding the dynamics and interactions of multiple ecosystem services. The aim of this study was to analyze how ecosystem services are distributed and interact across a landscape, and explore the implications of the scale of analysis for understanding the results. We quantified 12 ecosystem services across an agricultural landscape in southern Quebec, analyzed trade-offs between ecosystem services in space, and identified distinct bundles of ecosystem services across the landscape. We estimated values for crop, pork and maple syrup production, water quality, deer hunting, tourism, nature appreciation, summer cottages, forest recreation, carbon sequestration, soil retention of phosphorus, and organic matter in soil.
Results/Conclusions
Our analyses showed that most ecosystem services are strongly correlated with at least several other ecosystem services, either positively or negatively. We found that all of the 12 ecosystem services analyzed at the scale of municipalities (~74km2) have distinctive spatial patterns and 11 show a clumped spatial distribution. Multivariate analysis revealed clusters of municipalities on the landscape characterized by distinctive bundles of ecosystem services. The strongly clustered spatial patterns of individual and bundles of ecosystem services suggest that the scale at which ecosystem services are analyzed could be critical to identifying and understanding the most important system dynamics to be managed. We discuss how the scales of three sets of processes in social-ecological systems need to be taken into account in the assessment and sustainable management of ecosystem services: (1) the scale of ecosystem service production; (2) the scale of ecosystem service consumption, often complicated by markets, trade, and differences in how different types of ecosystem services are used; and (3) the scale of governance or management of ecosystem services.