Ecosystem services: a useful concept for soil policy making!

This paper is based on the session ‘Ecosystem services: a useful concept for soil policy making?’ at the Wageningen Applied Soil Conference in September 2011. In that session it was shown from different angles that policy awareness of the dependence of humankind on ecosystem services has resulted in the development of tools for optimal allocation and quantification of ecosystem services and raising awareness to stakeholders and decision makers. A number of case studies provided practical applications of developed tools that show how an ecosystem services approach can work as a way to value ecosystems. The use of ecosystem services may lead to mitigation of soil degradation and at the same time increase production of services both to private land owners as well as to the society as common goods. In our opinion the results available to date show that quantifying the benefits of ecosystems is a way to support the positive view stated in the title and we encourage the development of decision support tools based on more extensive yet user friendly integrated approaches of resource management, sector planning, and priority setting in the near future.

[1]  R. Lal,et al.  Soil Carbon Sequestration Impacts on Global Climate Change and Food Security , 2004, Science.

[2]  J. Aronson,et al.  Restoration of ecosystem services and biodiversity: conflicts and opportunities. , 2011, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[3]  D. de Zwart,et al.  Complex mixture toxicity for single and multiple species: Proposed methodologies , 2005, Environmental toxicology and chemistry.

[4]  F. Chapin,et al.  A safe operating space for humanity , 2009, Nature.

[5]  M. Patterson,et al.  A framework for classifying and quantifying the natural capital and ecosystem services of soils , 2010 .

[6]  A. Troy,et al.  Valuing ecosystem services , 2010, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[7]  Scott Dyer,et al.  Making ecosystem reality checks the status quo , 2012, Environmental toxicology and chemistry.

[8]  L. Brussaard,et al.  A method to assess ecosystem services developed from soil attributes with stakeholders and data of four arable farms. , 2012, The Science of the total environment.

[9]  Wouter Van Reeth,et al.  Landgebruik in Vlaanderen , 2009 .

[10]  P. Reich,et al.  Biodiversity and ecosystem stability in a decade-long grassland experiment , 2006, Nature.

[11]  Murray Patterson,et al.  Response to Robinson and Lebron -- Learning from complementary approaches to soil natural capital and ecosystem services , 2010 .

[12]  Rattan Lal,et al.  SOIL CARBON SEQUESTRATION TO MITIGATE CLIMATE CHANGE AND ADVANCE FOOD SECURITY , 2007 .

[13]  J. Cornelissen,et al.  Plant functional traits and soil carbon sequestration in contrasting biomes. , 2008, Ecology letters.

[14]  M. Lange,et al.  Bottom-up effects of plant diversity on multitrophic interactions in a biodiversity experiment , 2010, Nature.

[15]  Dirk J. Roux,et al.  Can ecosystem services lead ecology on a transdisciplinary pathway? , 2010, Environmental Conservation.

[16]  R. O'Neill,et al.  The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital , 1997, Nature.

[17]  Chris Freeman,et al.  Additional carbon sequestration benefits of grassland diversity restoration , 2011 .

[18]  A. Power.  Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies , 2010, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.