Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem Services is an international, interdisciplinary journal that seeks to enhance science, policy and practice surrounding ecosystem services, which are direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems to human wellbeing. The journal is associated with the Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP).

The aim of the journal is to improve the understanding and management of ecosystem services—including their dynamics, interactions, social and economic benefits and their distribution, and pluralistic values—in systems with different levels of human influence, across local to global scales.

Manuscripts will contribute to the above aim by:

(1) Advancing technologies, methods, and data to capture and, where appropriate, empirically measure the dynamics and values of ecosystem services—through innovation, integration, conceptualization or testing.

(2) Generating and integrating knowledge and information on ecosystem services and their interactions, including in the context of other conceptual frameworks that describe human-nature relations.

(3) Fostering dialogues between science and policy that provide decision-makers with robust empirical evidence on ecosystem services assessment and valuation, support mainstreaming into economic and land-use management policies, and shed light on the consequences of policies and management for ecosystem services, sustainability, and nexus approaches.

Manuscripts must be appropriately grounded in, or critically engage with, state-of-the-art frameworks that address human-nature relationships, ranging from dualistic to holistic, and the broader context of ecosystem service science, policy or practice (including, for example, Nature’s Contributions to People, Nature-based Solutions). They may be interdisciplinary or draw from specialized fields, including ecological, economic, social, health, psychological, environmental and political sciences. Papers should be of relevance to an international audience. We encourage the submission of novel empirical and conceptual work.

We welcome applications of established tools (e.g., InVEST) when they make a clear contribution to advancing ecosystem services knowledge. Manuscripts that replicate standard workflows without new data, methods, or policy-relevant insight will not be considered.

Manuscripts dealing with ecosystem services data and models should be reproducible and demonstrate Open Science best practices, such as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), and Collective benefit, Authority of control, Responsible and Ethical (CARE) principles. We encourage monetary valuation papers to align their work with the structure of the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD; https://www.esvd.info/).

Published articles may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Diverse and plural benefits and values of ecosystem services, including economic and socio-cultural valuation approaches.

• Integration of ecosystem services into governance and policy frameworks, including natural capital accounting, ex ante and ex post policy evaluation, integrated planning for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, and issues of environmental equity and justice.

• Innovative public and private financing and business strategies, including Payment for Ecosystem Services, blue and green bonds, debt-for-nature swaps, and ecological fiscal transfers.

• Innovative institutional designs to better manage and steward ecosystem services, including common asset trusts, cooperatives, and deliberative democracy institutions.

• Role of ecosystem services in sustainable environmental practices (e.g., land use, soils, water), including Nature-based Solutions, building with nature, and ecosystem restoration.

• Advances in co-production, decision support tools, and community engagement in the context of ecosystem services.

• Methodological innovation in ecosystem services assessments, modelling, and mapping, including applications of artificial intelligence and big data research techniques, and across scales.

• Transparent and reproducible science, including replicability studies, data and methods sharing.