Mechanistic ecological and economic models are becoming essential tools for conservation of biodiversity and the services it provides. Biodiversity is more likely to be conserved if conservation is clearly shown to provide valuable ecosystem services, so conservation success can depend strongly on our ability to understand and quantify ecosystem services provided by specific biodiversity resources. Conservation success also depends on our ability to predict biodiversity responses to management actions. Very often, the systems we address are too complex to understand and predict using only traditional field experiments and empirical science: there are too many variables, interactions, uncontrolled or stochastic events, effects of behavior, etc. for empirical modeling to be sufficiently predictive. Therefore, we turn to mechanistic models as a way to design and predict responses to biodiversity management measures and to quantify the resulting ecosystem services. Mechanistic ecological models, often individual-based, can link biodiversity measures such as abundance and distribution of key species to management decisions such as land uses and harvest rates. Results of such models can often be directly linked to economic or social models designed to predict the value to humans of alternative biodiversity outcomes. We will illustrate these approaches with prominent examples and provide guidance on their successful application. The opening speaker will introduce important ecosystem services management issues and illustrate the need for mechanistic models. The final speaker will summarize the current state of mechanistic ecological modeling and provide guidance on strategies and techniques for designing models with sufficient yet not excess complexity, developing and testing reliable theory for model mechanisms, and for analyzing and interpreting results. The other speakers will provide guidance and recommendations from experience with ecological and economic models used in fields such as marine fish harvest, agricultural land use, stream fish management, and tropical forest management.