Increasing attention is being paid to the provision of ecosystem services within urban areas, those places where the beneficiaries of those services reside at greatest densities. Here we report the influence of scale and densification on this provision, providing essential background for urban planning, greenspace management, conservation measures and sustainable development.

In the central Andes water and woodlands have been critical resources for human populations over the last 5000 years. During this period societies have developed from hunter-gatherers into ‘civilizations’. Palaeoecological and archaeological records reveal coincident cycles of past environmental and societal change showing that long-term (>100 year) societal development was paced by both increases and decreases in ecosystem service provision.

Cities suffer from high disturbance, low quality habitats and reduced access to green space. Social-ecological innovation can mitigate against loss of quality naturalistic spaces and their associated ecosystem services. A mapping study of sites of social-ecological innovation in Manchester showed their distribution was uneven due to environmental and social factors.

Is the popularity of payments for ecosystem services justified based on current scheme outcomes? Advocated widely in policy circles do PES improve upon existing command-and-control strategies? Furthermore, is the view that they de-centralise bureaucracy, increase ownership over local natural resources and provide transparent linkages between service providers and beneficiaries accurate? This talk critically appraises current thinking surrounding PES.

The ecosystem services from the Naivasha basin are dominated by irrigated roses exported over the world – one of Kenya’s top 3 currency earners. The value of this trade coupled with the degradation of the lake, has led to the development of several schemes which seek to recycle money earned into ecosystem restoration and conservation. We examine five schemes.

We carried out a systematic review of the literature on where ecosystem service interventions had the potential to or resulted in trade-offs. Of 1092 potentially relevant articles, 213 were selected for review. Trade-offs arise between services (biophysical trade-offs) and between benefits from services (trade-offs between stakeholders). We analyse why these different trade-offs occur and discuss the economic and policy implications.

We explore communication in the process of developing the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA) based on qualitative analysis of individual experiences. We highlight dissatisfactions and challenges in communicating between disciplinary and sectoral groups. Based on our results, we suggest ideas to improve NEA follow-on initiatives and general efforts to improve biodiversity science-policy interfaces.

The relationship between Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) and ecosystem services has not been articulated clearly, leading to misinformed and inadequate SuDS designs.  A new conceptual model, informed by literature review, sets out the relationship between SuDS and ecosystem services in a way that facilitates greater understanding and better decision-making by SuDS planners and designers.

Mangroves are powerful natural carbon sinks and can raise the forest floor in response to sea level rise. A field experiment in Kenya explored the effects of tree removal on greenhouse gas emissions and sediment elevation. Treatment caused significantly higher fluxes of CO₂ and CH₄ and rapid subsidence, with important implications for managing mangroves as carbon stores and coastal buffers.

One common aim of wetland restoration is to increase the recreational value of an area. The quality of experience gained from visiting a restored site is affected by the balance of positive and negative features that are present, and the availability of those features to the visitor. Here we examine the interaction of these effects at a case study floodplain.

We present a comprehensive review of the impact of liquid biofuel production on ecosystem services. We show that 1) there is little evidence for impacts for most non-regulating services; 2) that most studies that do exist are modelled rather than empirical and 3) that there is some evidence that second generation biofuels have less impacts than first generation fuels.  

Soils form the foundation of terrestrial ecosystems, and are vital as they hold 75% of organic carbon (OC) stocks sequestered from the atmosphere. Urbanisation is widely presumed to degrade ecosystem services including OC storage. Quantification of urban soil OC stocks reveal that previous national inventories have seriously underestimated the contribution of cities and towns to provision of this ecosystem service.