Abstract
A growing literature aims to identify areas of congruence in the provision of multiple ecosystem goods and services. However, little attention has been paid to the effect that temporal variation in the provision of such services may have on understanding of these relationships. Due to a lack of temporally and spatially replicated monitoring surveys, such relationships are often assessed using data from disparate time periods. Utilising temporally replicated data for indices of freshwater quality and agricultural production we demonstrate that through time the biophysical values of ecosystem services may vary in a spatially non-uniform way. This can lead to differing conclusions being reached about the strength of relationships between services, which in turn has implications for the prioritisation of areas for management of multiple services. We present this first analysis to illustrate the effect that the use of such temporally disparate datasets may have, and to highlight the need for further research to assess under what circumstances temporal variation of this sort will have the greatest impact.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support of the Environment Agency for England and Wales for provision of data relating to fresh waters and in particular B. Brierley and P. Raven for helpful comments. The views expressed here are those of the authors and not the Environment Agency. This work was conducted during a U.K. Population Biology Network (UKPopNet) project (“Linking biodiversity and ecosystem services: processes, priorities and prospects”) which was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and Natural England.
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Holland, R.A., Eigenbrod, F., Armsworth, P.R. et al. The influence of temporal variation on relationships between ecosystem services. Biodivers Conserv 20, 3285–3294 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-011-0113-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-011-0113-1