Benis N Egoh

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Earth System Science

Across the western United States and elsewhere, the frequency and intensity of wildland fires are projected to increase, posing a challenge to natural‐resource management. While collaborative, multi‐benefit partnerships can provide opportunities to overcome barriers to effective management, in many cases these collaborations have been slow to form....

Agricultural incentive programs promote ecosystem health and biodiversity on California working lands and encourage a multitude of conservation goals. The various objectives, environmental impacts, and financial costs of conservation incentive programs are challenging to assess. The ecosystem services framework is a useful tool for identifying trad...

The social impacts of natural resource management are challenging to evaluate because their perceived benefits and costs vary across stakeholder groups. Nevertheless, ensuring social acceptance is essential to building public support for adaptive measures required for the sustainable management of ecosystems in a warming climate. Based on surveys w...

Forests across the Western U.S. face unprecedented risk due to historic fire exclusion, environmental degradation, and climate change. Forest management activities like ecological thinning, prescribed burning, and meadow restoration can improve landscape resilience. Resilient forests are at a lower risk of high-intensity wildfires, drought, insects...

Forest restoration through mechanical thinning, prescribed burning, and other management actions is vital to improving forest resilience to fire and drought across the Western United States, and yields benefits that can be monetized, including improvements in water supply and hydropower. Using California's Sierra Nevada as a study area, we assess t...

While international trade in agricultural commodities can spur economic development especially where governance is strong, there are also concerns about the local impacts of commodity production and their distribution on the environment and on people. The sustainable development goals (SDGs), though seeing trade as a means to support their achievem...

Mainstreaming of ecosystem service approaches has been proposed as one path toward sustainable development. Meanwhile, critics of ecosystem services question if the approach can account for the multiple values of ecosystems to diverse groups of people, or for aspects of inter- and intra-generational justice. In particular, an ecosystem service appr...

Ecosystem services are essential for human well-being, but are currently facing many natural and anthropogenic threats. Modeling and mapping ecosystem services helps us mitigate, adapt to, and manage these pressures, but overall the field faces multiple major limitations. These include: 1) data availability, 2) understanding, estimation , and repor...

While international trade in agricultural commodities can spur economic development especially where governance is strong, there are also concerns about the local impacts of commodity production and their distribution. Previous frameworks have primarily focused on trade effects on environmental conditions in production regions, as well as economic...

Understanding the benefits provided by restoring overstocked forests is crucial to guiding the choice of management actions, policy initiatives, and investments by beneficiaries, i.e., monetizing ecosystem services. Using stakeholder‐based fuzzy cognitive mapping, collected through workshops with natural‐resource professionals, we mapped the intera...

The use of recreational ecosystem services is highly dependent on the surrounding environmental and climate conditions. Due to this dependency, future recreational opportunities provided by nature are at risk from climate change. To understand how climate change will impact recreation we need to understand current recreational patterns, but traditi...

African conservation scientists in the diaspora are still a largely untapped resource for conservation efforts in Africa. Institutions that harbor diaspora scientists from Africa should view their presence, motivation, and skills as an excellent opportunity to build strong bridges with the continent and undercut parachute science. Yet, parachute sc...

In this study we investigate whether the increasing investment in smallholder oil palm plantations that contributes to deforestation is motivated by financial gains or other factors. We evaluate the financial viability of smallholder farmers selling fresh fruit bunches (FFBs) to intermediaries or agro-industrial companies with mills, or processing...

International efforts to avoid dangerous climate change aim for global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to be net-zero by midcentury. Such a goal will require both drastically reducing emissions from high-income countries and avoiding large increases in emissions from still-developing countries. Yet most analyses focus on rich-country emissions reduc...

Palm oil is an important commodity contributing to livelihoods of many communities, GDP of governments and the achievement of several sustainable development goals (SDG) including no poverty, zero hunger and decent work and economic growth. However, its cultivation and continuous expansion due to high and increasing demand has led to many negative...

Throughout the world, biodiversity and nature's contributions to people are under threat, with clear changes evident. Biodiversity and ecosystem services have particular value in Africa– yet they are negatively impacted by a range of drivers, including land use and climate change. In this communication, we show evidence of changing biodiversity and...

Invasive alien species (IAS) are known to pose a serious threat to biodiversity, and reduce the ability of ecosystems to provide benefits to humans. In recognition of this threat and to address the impacts of IAS, Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted Aichi Biodiversity Target 9, which is dedicated to the control or eradic...

Full text: https://rdcu.be/bVy8H | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0412-1 | doi: 10.1038/s41893-019-0412-1 | Regional and global assessments periodically update what we know, and highlight what remains to be known, about the linkages between people and nature that both define and depend upon the state of the environment. To guide resear...

Non-technical summary There are significant challenges to retaining indigenous biodiversity and ecological infrastructure in African cities. These include a lack of formal protection and status for remnant ecologically functional patches rendering them open to ad hoc human settlement, which is in part linked to weak governance and management emergi...

A horizon scan was conducted to identify emerging and intensifying issues for biodiversity conservation in South Africa over the next 5–10 years. South African biodiversity experts submitted 63 issues of which ten were identified as priorities using the Delphi method. These priority issues were then plotted along axes of social agreement and scient...

Extensively managed grasslands are recognized globally for their high biodiversity and their social and cultural values. However, their capacity to deliver multiple ecosystem services (ES) as parts of agricultural systems is surprisingly understudied compared to other production systems. We undertook a comprehensive overview of ES provided by natur...

Africa has rich and varied biological resources forming the continent’s natural wealth on which its social and economic systems are based (well established). Most, if not all, terrestrial ecosystems in Africa have already experienced major biodiversity losses in the past 30 years, which has negative impacts on nature’s contribution to people. The p...

Africa has rich and varied biological resources forming the continent’s natural wealth on which its social and economic systems are based (well established). Most, if not all, terrestrial ecosystems in Africa have already experienced major biodiversity losses in the past 30 years, which has negative impacts on nature’s contribution to people. The p...

Effective planning of a large-scale restoration project is challenging, because of the range of factors that need to be considered (e.g. restoration of multiple habitats with varying degradation levels, multiple restoration goals and limited conservation resources). Ecological restoration planning studies typically focus on biodiversity and ecosyst...

Globally, environmental and social change in water-scarce regions challenge the sustainability of social-ecological systems. WaterSES, a sponsored working group within the Program for Ecosystem Change and Society, explores and compares the social-ecological dynamics related to water scarcity across placed-based international research sites with con...

Mapping ecosystem services (ES) has become an important tool to study nature's contributions to people (NCP) spatially and to manage ecosystems sustainably. However, few of these studies have been carried out in Africa and even fewer in drylands. This is not surprising, as drylands in general have not received much attention in the field of ecosyst...

There is no unified evidence base to help decision-makers understand how the multiple components of natural capital interact to deliver ecosystem services. We systematically reviewed 780 papers, recording how natural capital attributes (29 biotic attributes and 11 abiotic factors) affect the delivery of 13 ecosystem services. We develop a simple ty...

The restoration of degraded forests to enhance biodiversity, ecosystem services, as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation is now a major priority in cities around the world. This study evaluated the success of the Buffelsdraai Landfill Site Community Reforestation Project in Durban, South Africa, by assessing ecological attributes. Measu...

Land degradation response actions need motivated stakeholders and investments to improve land management. In this study we present methods to prioritise locations for degradation mitigation investments based on stakeholder preferences for ecosystem services. We combine participatory and spatial modelling approaches and apply these for Zambia, South...

The PECS-WaterSES compares the social-ecological dynamics causing and caused by water scarcity and governance across international research sites with conflicting local and regional water needs and governance, including arid southern Spain, the south-central Great Plains of Oklahoma (US), and the Portneuf and Treasure Valleys, Idaho (US). WaterSES...

Ecosystem services research faces several challenges stemming from the plurality of interpretations of classifications and terminologies. In this paper we identify two main challenges with current ecosystem services classification systems: i) the inconsistency across concepts, terminology and definitions, and; ii) the mix up of processes and end-st...

Ecosystem services research faces several challenges stemming from the plurality of interpretations of ecosystem services classifications and terminologies. In this paper we identify two main challenges with current ecosystem services classification systems: i) the inconsistency across concepts, terminology and definitions, and; ii) the mix up of p...

In Africa, as elsewhere around the world, globalization in the conservation sector manifests itself in numerous ways, notably in the similarity across nations in their strategies and approaches to conservation through the influence of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) (Rodriguez et al., 2007) and in the sensitivity of local conser...

In the EU, the mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services, abbreviated to MAES, is seen as a key action for the advancement of biodiversity objectives, and also to inform the development and implementation of related policies on water, climate, agriculture, forest, marine and regional planning. In this study, we present the development...

Large-scale ecological restoration is receiving increasing attention because of its contribution to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services provision, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. One of the biggest challenges facing large-scale restoration is to identify and prioritize restoration action/s that, if implemented, can achieve t...

Keywords: The ecosystem–water–food–energy nexus Freshwater ecosystems services Mapping SWAT modeling European Union Danube river basin a b s t r a c t Water, food and energy are at the core of human needs and there is a boundless complex cycle among these three basic human needs. Ecosystems are in the center of this nexus, since they contribute to...

Kotiaho & Moilanen (2015) highlighted what they call a conceptual flaw in our study (Egoh et al . 2014) and some operational flaws. Here, we respond to these. According to Kotiaho & Moilanen (2015), the conceptual flaw is that we supposedly neglect both the magnitude of degradation and the magnitude of improvement of the ecosystem condition expecte...

Ecosystem services research needs to become more transdisciplinary.•ecoSERVICES will advance co-designed, transdisciplinary ecosystem service research. Ecosystem services have become a mainstream concept for the expression of values assigned by people to various functions of ecosystems. Even though the introduction of the concept has initiated a va...

35 Ecosystem services have become a mainstream concept for the expression of values assigned by people to various functions of ecosystems. Even though the introduction of the concept has initiated a vast amount of research, progress in using this knowledge for sustainable resource use remains insufficient. We see a need to broaden the scope of rese...

A systematic literature review was undertaken to analyse the linkages between different biodiversity attributes and 11 ecosystem services. The majority of relationships between attributes and ecosystem services cited in the 530 studies were positive. For example, the services of water quality regulation, water flow regulation, mass flow regulation...

The Convention on Biological Diversity ( CBD ) and the European Union have set a target of restoring 15% of degraded ecosystems by 2020 with the aim of conserving biodiversity and enhancing the supply of ecosystem services. This target must be implemented alongside other similar targets aimed at reducing the number of threatened habitat and species...

The second MAES report presents indicators that can be used at European and Member State's level to map and assess biodiversity, ecosystem condition and ecosystem services according to the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES v4.3). This work is based on a review of data and indicators available at national and European...

PRISMA checklist [1] applied to this review paper. (DOC)

Compilation of terms used in the literature to refer to each marine and coastal ecosystem service (MCES). No examples (and, therefore, no synonyms) were found for weather regulation. (DOC)

List of indicators and units found during the systematic review of published marine and coastal ecosystem service (MCES) assessments. Indicators are classified following the cascade model into capacity, flow and benefit (see section 2.4 and fig. 2). (DOC)

Research on ecosystem services has grown exponentially during the last decade. Most of the studies have focused on assessing and mapping terrestrial ecosystem services highlighting a knowledge gap on marine and coastal ecosystem services (MCES) and an urgent need to assess them. We reviewed and summarized existing scientific literature related to M...

Mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services An analytical framework for ecosystem assessments under action 5 of the EU biodiversity strategy to 2020 : discussion paper – final, April 2013 Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 calls Member States to map and assess the state of ecosystems and their services in their national t...

For many years humans have benefi ted from provisioning services such as meat from hunting of wild animals, raw material and livestock grazing; regulating services such as water and climate regulation; supporting services such as soil fertility; and cultural services such as recreation. These Ecosystem Services (ESs) are now being degraded and used...

Indicators for mapping ecosystem services: a review

a b s t r a c t Scientific work on ecosystem services has been growing globally as well as in Africa. Human dependence on provisioning ecosystem services in particular is mostly acknowledged in developing countries like those in Africa, where many people are poor and reliant on natural resources. The reliance of communities on natural resources in...

Scientific work on ecosystem services has been growing globally as well as in Africa. Human dependence on provisioning ecosystem services in particular is mostly acknowledged in developing countries like those in Africa, where many people are poor and reliant on natural resources. The reliance of communities on natural resources in Africa varies fr...

Mainstreaming ecosystem services into policy and decision making is dependent on the availability of spatially explicit information on the state and trends of ecosystems and their services. In particular, the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 addresses the need to account for ecosystem services through biophysical mapping and valuation. This paper...