Ecosystem Services in Working Lands: US Northeast

However, a stringent focus on only the products or outcomes of discrete ecological processes curtails the complexity of socio-ecological systems (Selmen 2009), especially those inherent to working lands and landscapes. Therefore, this assessment relies on the framework of landscape multifunctionality (the joint supply of multiple, stacked ecosystem services; see Section 2.3 for further discussion) and a broader, contemporary framework of ecosystem services created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (2017). The expanded IPBES framework codes a variety of nature’s contributions to people — or ecosystem services — into 18 categories. These four categories are grouped by their specific function to people and include regulating contributions, material contributions, and non- material contributions (Table 4).

Table 4. Conceptualization of nature’s contributions to people (NCP) or ecosystem services by the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2017)

As laid out in the IPBES framework, regulating contributions consist of ecosystem services that regulate and maintain the natural processes of an environment (see Díaz et al. 2015). These include everything from habitat creation and maintenance to soil formation and the regulation of detrimental organisms and natural hazards. Material contribution s consist of material flows from the environment to people and include

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