Ecosystem services, otherwise known as nature's benefits, are the multitude of benefits that come from healthy natural systems. They include tangible benefits like food, fiber, fresh water, and climate regulation as well as less tangible services like spiritual, recreational, and aesthetic benefits. Ecosystem services also cover the basic processes that underlie these benefits including oxygen production, soil formation, habitat creation, and nutrient cycling.

National forests and grasslands provide an array of highly valuable ecosystem services including recreation, water (quality and quantity), carbon sequestration and storage to help mitigate climate change, food, air filtration, social and cultural values, timber and other forest products, as well as fish and wildlife habitat and biodiversity. Defining and articulating the value of these ecosystem services enhances our appreciation of these benefits. The Forest Service advances the science and tools that help fully value ecosystem services and better evaluate the management decisions that impact them.

The Forest Service invests in ecosystem service research because:

• Following a consistent framework and set of metrics allows land managers across diverse landscapes to better communicate decisions and analyze trade-offs. By using an ecosystem services framework, the Forest Service can identify and implement models to inform balanced management decisions.

• Evaluating ecosystem services helps sustain benefits and improve forest and grassland management outcomes.

• Quantifying the economic value of ecosystem services can provide the basis for payments, markets, and partnerships to leverage investments in shared benefits from sustainable forest and grasslands management across multiple ownerships.

• Ecosystem service research helps facilitate connections between traditional and non-traditional stakeholders across the urban to rural continuum.

Featured Work

Integrating ecosystem services into national Forest Service policy and operations is a Forest Service publication that identifies needs and opportunities to incorporate an ecosystem services approach into agency programs and activities.

Assessment and valuation of forest ecosystem services: State of the science review focuses on the assessment and economic valuation of forest ecosystem services. It provides a reference for forest economists and land managers interested in developing the practice of integrated forest modeling and valuation.  

Ecosystem Services as a Framework for Forest Stewardship: Deschutes National Forest Overview describes a collaboration between the Deschutes National Forest and Pacific Northwest Research Station to explore how an ecosystem service approach can enhance forest stewardship in central Oregon.

Trees at work: Economic accounting for forest ecosystem services in the U.S. South is a guide to quantifying annual flows of ecosystem services, developing a spatial catalog of the marginal values of changes in those flows, and accounting for the total value of ecosystem services lost or gained as a result of changes in forest ecosystems.

The "Effects of climate change on ecosystem services in the Northern Rockies Region" chapter of the report Climate change vulnerability and adaptation in the Northern Rocky Mountains explores the ecosystem services provided to people who visit, live adjacent to, or otherwise benefit from natural resources on public lands.