We rely on our physical environment for many things - clean
water, land for crops or pastures, storm water absorption, and recreation,
among others. Yet it has been challenging to figure out how to sustain the many
benefits people obtain from nature - so-called "ecosystem services" -
in any given landscape because an improvement in one may come at the cost of
another.
Two ecologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report
this week (July 1) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a
novel approach to analyzing the production and location of 10 different
ecosystem services across a landscape, opening the door to being able to
identify factors governing their synergies and tradeoffs.