Land Use and Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem services are the benefits that functioning landscapes provide to people — clean water, carbon storage, food production, pollination, flood regulation — and land use change is one of the primary forces eroding them. As cities expand, forests are cleared, and agricultural frontiers shift, researchers work to map where these benefits are produced, who depends on them, and how quickly they are being lost or redistributed across the globe. A central challenge is understanding the spatial mismatches between where ecosystems generate services and where human populations actually receive them, since policy and conservation efforts often operate without that clarity. Active research is pushing toward better models of how simultaneous pressures — urbanization, climate shifts, and biodiversity loss — interact across scales, and how governance of social-ecological systems can be designed before critical thresholds are crossed rather than after.

Works

111,383

Total citations

2,339,874

Keywords

Ecosystem ServicesLand Use ChangeUrbanizationGlobal ImpactBiodiversity ConservationSustainability