Linking landscapes to people: Defining and mapping service-sheds for multiple ecosystem services

Background/Question/Methods

Ecosystems are embedded in landscapes and provide foundational goods and services to people. Quantifying the flows of such ecosystem services (ES) to communities that benefit from them is essential to identify supply-demand mismatches and develop sustainable social-ecological systems. However, spatially mapping how ecological processes culminate into services and flow to communities has not been well explored or cataloged across a range of services. To simplify the accounting of these connections, service-sheds have emerged as a useful spatial unit. A service-shed is defined as the area from which a specific benefit is generated for a specific beneficiary community. Service-sheds can be used to spatially link ES supply and disaggregated beneficiaries, addressing the limitations of the aggregation of human well-being. In this study, we first review the limited previous literature that uses the serviceshed concept. Second, we develop a simple typology of different serviceshed types. Finally, we present an approach to delineating servicesheds for multiple ecosystem services, using Canada as a case study.

Results/Conclusions

Our typology highlights different spatial characteristics that define servicesheds for selected ecosystem services. We spatially identify local and distant servicesheds for different beneficiary groups across Canada. By doing so, we estimate the services that provide benefits to communities and also locate where these benefits originate on the landscape. These simple serviceshed models may be applied to a wide variety of ecosystem services and systems to address the need for spatially unbundling ESs into explicit benefits. Understanding these service flows and the connection between landscapes and communities is essential to help inform future management decisions.