Could yout specify the question? I think it seems to be wide. In my opinion, forest management is typical ecosystem services improvement

Refers to:

Specific examples of ecosystem services, understood as a service to the resources or processes of natural ecosystems that benefit humans. Includes products such as clean drinking water and processes such as decomposition of waste.

they were perhaps not improved but have slowed the detriment or ecosystem vulnerability, which can be mitigated by specific actions implemented by society and government,

There eg in determining areas of an aquifer with a "sustainable" extraction by closing the induced or urban hydrologic cycle, returning a portion of the extracted water. This has an economic, environmental and social impact.

To facilitate decision making, they are assigning economic values to many ecosystem services, often values based on replacement cost alternatives anthropogenic

Yes Carmen, there is effort in showing the real value of an ecosystem, value that sometime we do not have full understanding of.  We find out what a part of an ecosystem worth when it is no longer sustainable e.g. dust in the air, invasive species and rhinitis, low quality of groundwater, soil humus loss. The idea is to prevent degrading huge services with a project or a plan (lets say  a specific industrial project) that provides some money but the whole demage that will be done to nature cost even more.

As an example of the most common approach to promote and foster forest ecosystem service and combat land degradation is the development, introduction and promotion of sustainable production systems. The assumption is that new technologies will be adopted, that a market for the derived products will develop, and that they will generate higher incomes to land owners, creating an incentive to maintain and improve the forest ecosystem services. An alternative approach to encouraging the conservation and restoration of forest ecosystem is to pay for conservation performance directly to private lands owners. In this approach, those that benefit from the provision of environmental services, derived from land uses and production systems that improve the environment and life quality, make payments to those land owners that supply the services (i.e., to those that adopt the desired land uses and production systems). In the case of land uses such as forest management, commercial reforestation, as well as forest conservation, the payments for environmental services are additional to the incomes from forest products sales, therefore, they help to improve the irregular cash flow frequently seen in forest production systems. The Costa Rican Payments for Environmental Services Program (PESP) is an application of this approach. In this system, landowners receive direct payments for the ecological services which their lands produce when they adopt land uses and forest management techniques that do not have negative impacts on the environment and which maintain people's life quality.

Dear All,

I think planting and taking care of hedges and hedge systems as ecological corridors can contribute to biodiversity conservation at agricultural areas as well as to control pest population with the help of natural enemies and indifferent organisms saved.

My example is from a low-land in a former marshy area. The river of Jijia in the historical region of Moldavia, NE Romania. Moldavia is known for its hundreads of ponds for acvaculture and irrigation. So, the Valley of Jijia was transfromed by human activity via many large and small water basins increasing profits of fish production and other. The valley was also transformed to prevent flood risks. Meanwhile this human activities increased biodiversity with tens of bird species coming here. It has BirdLife International and Natura 2000 status with 20.000 individual wild birds per year.

Dear Dan L. Stoica

You will find many interesting and practical, good examples in the above - so just at more theoretical comment.

If you consider human influence as "disturbance" sensu lato - the you will be able to have a lot of this as examples of expoitation of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis for ecosystems (IDH).

Some of the IDH's known are intrinsic and/or caused by physioco-geographical conditios of the area -

But the same framework can be applied for human activities.

Take also a look at text books in Ecological Engineering and thejournal of the same name - they will be full of examples

Good luck

Søren NN

Thank you Nielsen I will look into Ecological Engineering

You mean biodiversity can be interpreted also for nature influencing factor besides human intervention ? Lets say ... a landslide can affect a pasture with rare flowers ?

Exactly - the "odd" thing is that this seemingly contradicts some of the 24 principles of E.P. Odum - disturbances may indeed support a higher biodiversity and serve to "maintain" the eco-system at another condition than the hypothesized climax society.

Another example would be the Cypress swamps at some places in North America - the continous existence of which are only ensured by periodical/regular burn offs triggered by thunderstorms

Best wishes

Søren

It is interesting and I've heard of such examples, some of them the kind that interfere in vegetation succession to maintain desired habitats for birds or other, some of them, like mowing to maintain diversity in steppis pastures like in my region or purely natural , like flooding for alluvial soils.

What I'm interested the most now are good examples of trade-offs or balance between biodiversity keep-up and economic profit, where both go well. Also examples that can economically be quatified and compared with ecosystem services loss and, hence, income loss at less understood human interventions.

Dear Dan,

Nice question! In my dissertation I have been assessing domestic gardens and their contributions to biodiversity and ecosystem services. Domestic gardens are nice examples of where people can improve the amount and quality of ecosystem services to a high extent (but often sadly the trend shows the reverse as well). They take up a significant amount of space in urban areas and therefore it matters how they are designed. I did case studies on front-yards in Phoenix, Arizona and Maastricht in the Netherlands and there was a representative questionnaire in the Netherlands on how people value, use, design and maintain their gardens (and whether this contributes to ESS and biodiversity or not).

I did not look very deep into the economic valuation question, but I think quantification of the value of green domestic gardens maybe rather easy. Apart from the food one could grow in gardens, you can think for example about the estate values, or excess rainwater capture that would otherwise put pressure on sewerage systems, or saving costs on health care because green contributes to human well-being and health, or mitigating urban heat island effects etc. 

You might like to read chapters 10, 11 and 12 of my dissertation. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. 

Dissertation: http://carijnbeumer.wix.com/bimby#!dissertation/c1qqj

Chapter 10 has also been published in Sustainability Science: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-014-0270-8

Kind Regards,

Carijn

Thank you Carjin, yes it's good point to start and I think a very well applied research because sustains understanding of biodiversity importanace from top (carbon cycle) to bottom (carrots in the garden).

I think here it might come also to compost and carbon sequestration that millions of gardens in the world might get involved.

Excellent discussions colleagues!

I would say almost all environmental restoration projects performed at a small community/central government/ global scale will fall into this category. In New Zealand, thousands of kilometres of stream and river margins are being fenced off from livestock to sustain riparian margins (e.g. Taranaki Regional Council); hundreds of hectares of hill country pasture are retired to regenerate trees to minimise soil erosion (e.g. Horizons Regional Council); many peat lakes and wetlands are being restored (e.g. Waikato Regional Council)  and several freshwater lakes are being restored (e.g. Bay of Plenty Regional Council). I have provided the respective regional authority's name for you to track their work on their websites.

Human intervention is an interesting term. It could be in the form of government driven environmental regulations or voluntary mechanisms or some form of global treaty. Interestingly, consumers or major supermarket chains demanding certified organic produce (which is believed to have the outcome of reduced use of agri-chemicals and in turn their reduced effects on ecosystems) could also be considered as a form of human intervention.

Dear Dan, 

you can find some examples (or attemps) of ES evaluation and improvement of ES potential through landscape and/or urban management in more than 20 case studies - see 

http://www.openness-project.eu/cases

Here you can see the basic information about all case studies and if you will be intersested in some specific cases, let me know - I´ll try to manage it. 

All the best

Peter

Thank you Selva, interesting point of view. I'm looking for cases where human activity  was not a restoration intervention but just a secular environmental friendly resources use that also sustained economic profit. Of course examples of well-fare loss as inadequate use of nature resources are welcome to trigger deeper understanding of the theme. On the other hand simply, when we say rehabilitation or restoration, there are effort and money that fill the gap of misuse of natural resources.

Meanwhile when I say economic and money I'm not thinking of money per se as no nature lover could really do this but I see a good opportunity to ,,defeat" profit over nature with its' own ,,weapons" :)

Interesting concept to apply nature valorisation to environmental matters or ecosystems management Dan. Well done! If I interpret correctly, the 'values' (one of which could be economical and the others could be social or environmental) generated by an ecosystem service alone should be a self driver or motivator to support and sustain such an ecosystem service.

I think those who are trying to sustain any ecosystem service (whether it is a government or a community group) are always conscious of the enormous benefits of sustaining an ecosystem service. However, sustaining an ecosystem service appears to have different motives from interested parties, including that from the environmental advocates. Motives may be economical, ethical, social or even cultural.

My observation is that most ecosystem sustaining steps (I will be inclined to include restoration projects as well) appear to have unintended good outcomes. For example, many ecosystems services may be sustained for ethical (good stewardship) reasons which may have huge economic benefits.

You could use New Zealand as a case where we do have a 'clean & green' image among our export partners and tourists. Despite extensive agricultural land use and the significant income generated from farming alone (US$25 billion which is 50% of the total goods exported), we have managed to preserve in excess of 25% of the land area in reserves (most are referred to as National Parks), which are covered in native trees and bush with no residential buildings. Even building roads through certain National Parks are prohibited to preserve its natural character. The original motive must have been to ''showcase' 'nature' to our future generations. 

Coupled with the above parks and the excellent alpine lakes and waterways, whose water quality is considered as one of the best, tourism has also become a significant GDP generator, in billions almost par with farming. Government and the community realising such an economic benefit (i.e. tourism and export based on 'clean & green' image) eager to maintain or enhance environmental quality. You could say that the motive may have shifted one from ethical to economic. Regardless of this it could be concluded that sustaining an ecosystem service such as National Parks and the Alpine environment has been paying more dividends than required to maintain them in their original status. I apologise for this long answer, acknowledging the deep question.

Dear Selva,

It is very well presented and of course restoration is an important component. In Romania, apparently, environmental legislation is not very well applied yet but this is a misconcept of the transition from communism to democracy where we are still adapting laws. As you may find in various documentaries the biodiversity of Romania is huge compared to central and western Europe and of course this is human driven situation.  That is why I want to bring into light the Romanian cases where we kept high nature values while making profit. I would not put aside restoration of course which is highly important; it is the pure fact that what was not spoiled in nature is a good example to give.

...and of course one important step is to have a good understanding of ecosystem services either monetary, gene pool, ethical or sentimental.

Thank you for your the interesting feed-back.

Hi..

An example is the home gardens which are found in India. They provide many economic benefits in addition to biodiversity conservation. 

Benayas, J. M. R., Newton, A. C., Diaz, A., & Bullock, J. M. (2009). Enhancement of biodiversity and ecosystem services by ecological restoration: a meta-analysis. science, 325(5944), 1121-1124.

Guidetti, B.Y., G.C. Amico,S. Dardanelli & M.A. Rodriguez-Cabal. 2016. Artificial perches promote vegetation restoration. Plant Ecology 217:935–942.