Managing agricultural landscapes to provide multiple ecosystem services is a key challenge for ecosystem management. Efforts to enhance provisioning ecosystem services, such as agricultural production and timber, has led to loss of regulating and cultural ecosystem services, such as nutrient cycling, flood control, and opportunities for recreation. We developed a framework for analyzing the provision of multiple ecosystem services across landscapes to test for commonly appearing tradeoffs and synergies. Empirically quantifying the spatial patterns of 12 ecosystem services in a mixed-use landscape consisting of 137 municipalities in Quebec, Canada, we discovered six common bundles of ecosystem services (sets of services that appear together repeatedly across the landscape).
Results/Conclusions
Our results show landscape-scale tradeoffs between provisioning and almost all regulating and cultural ecosystem services, and they demonstrate that a greater diversity of ecosystem services is positively correlated with the provision of regulating ecosystem services. We examined the spatial concordance between forest corridors and provision of ecosystem services to learn that the existence of particular types of bundles can be predicted by the quality and connectivity of forested habitat in this region. Our results suggest that attempts to manage ecosystem services should focus on interactions among ecosystems services and should recognize that the characteristics of these interactions are likely to be strongly shaped by both social and ecological forces.