Global mapping of ecosystem services and conservation priorities

Global efforts to conserve biodiversity have the potential to deliver economic benefits to people (i.e., "ecosystem services"). However, regions for which conservation benefits both biodiversity and ecosystem services cannot be identified unless ecosystem services can be quantified and valued and their areas of production mapped. Here we review the theory, data, and analyses needed to produce such maps and find that data availability allows us to quantify imperfect global proxies for only four ecosystem services. Using this incomplete set as an illustration, we compare ecosystem service maps with the global distributions of conventional targets for biodiversity conservation. Our preliminary results show that…

• DA
  David and Lucile Packard Foundation
• NE
  Natural England
• LT
  Leverhulme Trust
• RS
  Royal Society
• UO
  University of East Anglia