Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer

Stanford University | SU · Woods Institute for the Environment

Nature’s contributions to people (NCP) are increasingly incorporated in modern conservation policy and management frameworks; however, the contributions of wildlife remain underrepresented in the NCP science that informs policy and practice. In this Perspective, we explore wildlife’s role in NCP. We use existing evidence to map wildlife contributio...

Existing approaches to evaluating companies on sustainability-related issues include limited accounting of impacts on nature and its contributions to human well-being. Here we present an approach for quantifying the direct impacts of companies’ physical assets on nature based on global maps for eight ecosystem service and biodiversity metrics. We a...

The tropical dry regions in the Neotropics are under intense anthropogenic pressures, resulting in changes for local communities related with their life patterns, wellbeing, and their relationship with ecosystems. The region has a history of human occupation that has shaped the traditional use of resources. We evaluated the richness, redundancy, an...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) can deliver many benefits to human wellbeing, including some crucial to climate adaptation. We quantitatively assess the global potential of NBS strategies of protection, restoration, and agroforestry by modeling global climate change mitigation and local ecosystem services (water availability, sediment retention, runof...

Demand for land is increasing due to mounting energy and development needs. Growing demand for food coupled with climate policy commitments calling for reduced greenhouse gas emissions will result in more land being used for agricultural and renewable energy development. At the same time, conserving land for biodiversity and nature’s contributions...

Based on an extensive model intercomparison, we assessed trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services from historical reconstructions and future scenarios of land-use and climate change. During the 20th century, biodiversity declined globally by 2 to 11%, as estimated by a range of indicators. Provisioning ecosystem services increased several fold...

Values play a significant role in decision-making, especially regarding nature. Decisions impact people and nature in complex ways and understanding which values are prioritised, and which are left out is an important task for improving the equity and effectiveness of decision-making. Based on work done for the IPBES Values Assessment, this paper d...

Non-technical summary In this paper, we explore how critically important ecosystems on the land provide evaporation to the atmosphere, which will later fall as precipitation elsewhere. Using a model-based analysis that tracks water flowing through the atmosphere, we find that more than two-thirds of the precipitation over critically important ecosy...

Meeting global commitments to conservation, climate, and sustainable development requires consideration of synergies and tradeoffs among targets. We evaluate the spatial congruence of ecosystems providing globally high levels of nature’s contributions to people, biodiversity, and areas with high development potential across several sectors. We find...

Satellite-derived Ecosystem Functional Types (EFTs) are increasingly used in ecology and conservation to characterize ecosystem heterogeneity. The diversity of EFTs, also known as Ecosystem Functional Diversity (EFD), has been suggested both as a potential metric of ecosystem-level biodiversity and as a predictor for ecosystem functioning, ecosyste...

Coastal ecosystems have the potential to contribute to disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change. While previous studies have estimated the value of current coastal ecosystems for reducing coastal risk, there have been relatively few studies that look at changes in ecosystem service provision, in the past and under climate change. We...

As countries consider new area-based conservation targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity, protected areas (PAs) and their impacts on people and nature are coming under increasing scrutiny. We review the evidence base on PA impacts, combining the findings from existing rigorous impact evaluations with local case studies developed for t...

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis³ still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature’s diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property ri...

Agricultural landscapes are critical to producing food, and other ecosystem services - the vital benefits that flow from ecosystems to people. This chapter reviews how multiple ecosystem services may be impacted by climate change, broadly concluding that most impacts tend to be negative both on supporting services for agricultural production and co...

Increasing human pressures are driving a global loss of biodiversity and of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP)—the contributions of living nature to people’s quality of life. Understanding the spatial relationship between biodiversity and NCP is essential for securing Earth’s life support systems. Here we estimate the importance of high-biodive...

Coastal ecosystems have the potential to contribute to disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change. While previous studies have estimated the value of current coastal ecosystems for reducing coastal risk, there have been relatively few studies that look at changes in ecosystem service provision, in the past and under climate change. We...

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture. This paper describes how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support decision-m...

As nations design a framework and a process for implementing the new goals and targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the question on how to report on the successes and failures of policy implementation is becoming more salient. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential role of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), Essent...

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is a worldwide plan to urgently address and reverse biodiversity loss, intending to achieve a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature by 2050. This paper seeks to contribute to operationalising the framework, specifically concerning biodiversity conservation and nature's contributions t...

As humanity has become increasingly urban, a growing number of people have been deprived of access to nature and the benefits it provides. This is especially true for marginalized groups, who often live in neighbourhoods where nature has been so diminished and degraded that it provides fewer types, and much lower levels of benefits. We review the l...

Sustaining ecosystem services (ES) critical to human well-being is hindered by many practitioners lacking access to ES models ("the capacity gap") or knowledge of the accuracy of available models ("the certainty gap"), especially in the world's poorer regions. We developed ensembles of multiple models at an unprecedented global scale for five ES of...

Meeting global commitments to conservation, climate, and sustainable development goals requires consideration of synergies and tradeoffs among targets. We evaluate the spatial congruence of ecosystems providing globally high levels of nature’s contributions to people, biodiversity, and areas with high development potential across several sectors. W...

Robust and routine ecosystem assessments will be fundamental to track progress towards achieving this decade’s global environmental and sustainability goals. Here we examine four needs that address common failure points of ecosystem assessments. These are (1) developing rapid, reproducible, and repeatable ecological data workflows, (2) harmonizing...

There has been a seismic shift in the center of gravity of scientific writing and thinking about agriculture over the past decades, from a prevailing focus on maximizing yields toward a goal of balancing trade‐offs and ensuring the delivery of multiple ecosystem services. Maximizing crop yields often results in a system where most benefits accrue t...

Sustaining the organisms, ecosystems and processes that underpin human wellbeing is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Here we define critical natural assets as the natural and semi-natural ecosystems that provide 90% of the total current magnitude of 14 types of nature’s contributions to people (NCP), and we map the global locations of...

An analysis of 16 ecosystem services measured across sites in Europe shows that the supply of some services is predicted by plot-scale diversity, whereas others rely on intact habitats at the landscape scale, highlighting the importance of cross-scale management efforts to maintain ecosystem services.

The InVEST Crop Pollination model operates on land use and land cover (LULC) characteristics, using available nesting sites and floral resources within a specified flight range to gauge the abundance and yield of bees species. In this study, we parameterize the InVEST Crop Pollination model to validate predictions of relative pollinator abundance i...

Riparian buffers—forests along rivers—generate many essential ecosystem services, and their protection and restoration are the focus of many policy efforts. Costa Rica is a global leader in this regard, where legislative and executive frameworks work in concert to conserve forests that deliver public benefits such as water quality and carbon storag...

Control of crop pests by shifting host plant availability and natural enemy activity at landscape scales has great potential to enhance the sustainability of agriculture. However, mainstreaming natural pest control requires improved understanding of how its benefits can be realized across a variety of agroecological contexts. Empirical studies sugg...

Increasing diversity on farms can enhance many key ecosystem services to and from agriculture, and natural control of arthropod pests is often presumed to be among them. The expectation that increasing the size of monocultural crop plantings exacerbates the impact of pests is common throughout the agroecological literature. However, the theoretical...

Increasing human pressures are driving a global loss of biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP). Here, we estimated how preserving regions of high biodiversity value could reduce the risk of diminishing the provision of NCP. We analysed the impact of four different scenarios of climate change on the regulation of air quality (NCP3),...

This is the final text version of Chapter 1. A laid-out version of the full assessment report will be made available in the coming months.

This is the final text version of Chapter 4. A laid-out version of the full assessment report will be made available in the coming months.

Forest carbon projects can deliver multiple benefits to society. Within Southeast Asia, 58% of forests threatened by loss could be protected as financially viable carbon projects, which would avoid 835 MtCO2e of emissions per year from deforestation, support dietary needs for an equivalent of 323,739 people annually from pollinator-dependent agricu...

Sustaining the organisms, ecosystems, and processes that underpin human well-being is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Here we identify critical natural assets, natural and semi-natural ecosystems that provide 90% of the total current magnitude of 14 types of nature’s contributions to people (NCP). Critical natural assets for maintaini...

Significance Tourism accounts for roughly 10% of global gross domestic product, with nature-based tourism its fastest-growing sector in the past 10 years. Nature-based tourism can theoretically contribute to local and sustainable development by creating attractive livelihoods that support biodiversity conservation, but whether tourists prefer to vi...

The IPBES Scoping document for the values assessment highlights the need to assess the types of values of nature that have (or have not) been incorporated into decision-making, the types of valuation approaches incorporated into decision-making, the challenges that have hindered the incorporation of diverse conceptualizations of values of nature in...

Background Global modeling of carbon storage and sequestration often mischaracterizes unique ecosystems such as the seasonally dry tropical forest of the central region of the Gulf of Mexico, because species diversity is usually underestimated, as is their carbon content. In this study, aboveground and soil carbon stocks were estimated to determine...

To the Editor — Wyborn and Evans argue that global priority maps for conservation have questionable utility and may crowd out local and more contextual research. While we agree with the authors’ central argument that effective and equitable conservation must be rooted at local scales, the assertion that “conservation needs to break free from global...

Sustaining the organisms, ecosystems, and processes that underpin human well-being is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Here we analyze 14 of nature’s contributions to people (NCP) for food, water, and climate security. Using spatial optimization, we identify critical natural assets, the most important ecosystems for providing NCP, comp...

Sustaining the organisms, ecosystems, and processes that underpin human well-being is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Here we identify critical natural assets, natural and semi-natural ecosystems that provide 90% of the total current magnitude of 14 types of nature’s contributions to people (NCP). Critical natural assets for maintaini...

Natural control of invertebrate crop pests has the potential to complement or replace conventional insecticide-based practices, but its mainstream application is hampered by predictive unreliability across agroecosystems. Inconsistent responses of natural pest control to changes in landscape characteristics have been attributed to ecological comple...

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) is a heuristic tool for co-creating positive futures for nature and people. It seeks to open up a diversity of futures through mainly three value perspectives on nature – Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, Nature as Culture. In this paper, we describe how the NFF can be applied in modelling to support policy....

Reforestation is an important strategy for nature-based climate solutions and identifying carbon storage potential of different locations is critical to its success. Applying average carbon values from forest inventories ignores the spatial heterogeneity in forest carbon and the effects of forest edges on carbon storage degradation. Here we show ho...

P lant species diversity can influence and provide multiple ecosystem services in terrestrial ecosystems 1-4. In managed ecosystems , plant diversity can be increased by adding more plant species within and around the managed areas or by increasing the structural variation of vegetation in the surrounding landscapes. Such increases in plant species...

Mongolia contains some of the largest intact grasslands in the world, but is vulnerable to future changes in climate and continued increases in the number of domestic livestock. As these are two major drivers of change, it is important to understand interactions between the impact of climate and grazing on productivity of Mongolia’s rangelands and...

Global social and economic changes, alongside climate change, are affecting the operating environment for agriculture, leading to efforts to increase production and yields, typically through the use of agrochemicals like pesticides and fertilizers, expanded irrigation, and changes in seed varieties. Intensification, alongside the expansion of agric...

The ecosystem service (ES) community aspires to illuminate how nature contributes to human well-being, and thereby elevate consideration of nature in decision making. So far, however, policy impact of ES research has been limited. To understand why, we identify five key elements of ES research that help inform decisions by connecting the supply of...

Producing sufficient food to meet rising demand is a precondition for resilience of the global food system in the face of climate and societal changes. Leveraging machine learning techniques, we project total caloric yields, aggregating 100 crops and assuming crop mix adaptation to climate, soil and management conditions. We then estimate terrestri...

Sustaining the organisms, ecosystems, and processes that underpin human well-being is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Here we analyze 12 of nature’s contributions to people (NCP) for food, water, and climate security. Using spatial optimization, we identify critical natural assets, the most important ecosystems for providing NCP, comp...

Recent synthesis studies have shown inconsistent responses of crop pests to landscape composition, imposing a fundamental limit to our capacity to design sustainable crop protection strategies to reduce yield losses caused by insect pests. Using a global dataset composed of 5242 observations encompassing 48 agricultural pest species and 26 crop spe...

Global biodiversity policy is at a crossroads. Recent global assessments of living nature (1, 2) and climate (3) show worsening trends and a rapidly narrowing window for action. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has recently announced that none of the 20 Aichi targets for biodiversity it set in 2010 has been reached and only six have bee...

Diversifying agricultural landscapes may mitigate biodiversity declines and improve pest management. Yet landscapes are rarely managed to suppress pests, in part because researchers seldom measure key variables related to pest outbreaks and insecticides that drive management decisions. We used a 13-year government database to analyse landscape effe...

Humanity places a heavy burden on agricultural landscapes, demanding plentiful food, multiple ecosystem functions, and biodiversity conservation. We quantified areas growing ‘brighter’ and ‘darker’ (i.e., better or worse than expected based on extrinsic constraints) for multifunctionality of ecosystem services (ES) over time across a dynamic agricu...

Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions models generally project a downward trend in CO2 emissions from land use change, assuming significant crop yield improvements. For some crops, however, significant yield gaps persist whilst demand continues to rise. Here we examine the land use change and GHG implications of meeting growing demand for maize. In...

Numerous studies have demonstrated that plant species diversity enhances ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems, including diversity effects on insects (herbivores, predators and parasitoids) and plants. However, the effects of increased plant diversity across trophic levels in different ecosystems and biomes have not yet been explored on...