Tropical forest service flows: Improving our understanding of the biophysicaldimension of ecosystem services

摘要

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) stressed, inmany compelling ways, the importance of maintaining a steadyflow of ecosystem services1 for both achieving sustainabledevelopment and satisfying critical human needs. Yet manychallenges lie ahead to fully incorporate the ecosystem servicesconcept into practical approaches to conservation and development(e.g., Ghazoul, 2007a,b). One of these challenges is scarcity ofsystematic information on stocks and flows of most of theseservices (Carpenter et al., 2009). This is particularly true in the caseof ‘‘regulating’’ services which, in essence, are ecological processesthat are relevant for human well being and that operate at varyingspatial scales (Table 1). In turn, many of these regulating servicesare prone to decline and/or degrade under current natural resourceuse patterns as they are usually unable to capture the prevailingparadigms of production, exchange and regulation (that is, theyare considered public goods), as opposed to provisioning services(e.g., food, fiber) derived from agriculture (Swinton et al., 2007).