Elsevier

Ecosystem Services

Volume 14, August 2015, Pages 24-26
Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem services: Where on earth?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2015.03.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We searched the literature on ecosystems services.

  • Results show an exponential growth starting on 1991.

  • However, only 47% of all articles describe the geographic area in either the title or abstract.

  • We suggest that such information should be included in titles, keywords or abstract.

Abstract

The analysis of temporal changes in the number of scientific articles written on ecosystem services shows an exponential growth from 1991 to 2013. However, it also shows a lack of information regarding the location of the studies and the type of ecosystem analyzed. A literature search showed that some regions (Antarctica) and ecosystems (urban) have been less studied. However, given the structure of the knowledge databases it is impossible to know if there are no studies or it is difficult to reach them.

Introduction

Four years ago, Gómez-Baggethun et al. (2010) stated: “The concept of ecosystem services is attracting increased attention…” However, that seems to be an understatement for the exponential growth of the literature on this subject matter (Fig. 1). We could illustrate the meaning of this growth with an example: if we request to one of our graduate students reading all the literature on ecosystem services published only during the year 2013, and in the process he/she takes one hour per article, reading 8 h a day, the process would take 6 months. If we push it to the extreme and ask him/her to read everything since the publication by Gómez-Baggethun et al. (2010) then it would take almost 2 years. Thus, it is impossible to keep track of all the literature being published on ecosystem services and this is where we raised our question: is the ecosystem service concept contingent to each ecosystem (in the sense of Schmitz, 2010)? In other words, do we need to address the study of ecosystem services in a system-by-system basis because each social-ecological system has evolved in a particular way that cannot be fully understood from global estimations? Costanza et al. (2014) have recently discussed this issue. They propose that global estimates on the value of ecosystem services are useful to increase awareness about them in a way that the general public may understand, but more spatially explicit approaches are necessary for other uses. Delgado (2010) and Delgado et al. (2013) have indeed show that the use of ecosystem services is contingent to the ecosystem condition (e.g. semi-pristine; under anthropogenic stress). Thus, ecologists or economists searching the literature about ecosystem services should know where they have been studied and what ecosystems have been analyzed. Is it possible to do it using current knowledge information systems? We contend that the answer is no and show it in this brief note with an example, ending with a discussion about changes we should implement in order to make the growing literature on this issue easily available not only to scientists but also to decision makers.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

We conducted our analysis using the Thomson Reuters Web of Science (2014) database, available over the Internet. We searched the 1980–2014 database using several alternatives: (1) “Ecosystem services” as the only topic; (2) using the previous topic plus the word Direct as a second topic; and (3) using “Ecosystem services” as first topic and country names making up to 95% of the human population for each continent as a second topic (see Table 1 for continental names). Number of articles for the

Results

The universe of articles published under the topic ecosystem services, as recorded by the Web of Science (2014), was 7277 for the period 1991–2014 (Fig. 1), and when the term Direct was added to the search, the number decreased to 477 (7%). Furthermore, the analysis of abstracts and keywords of the latter set showed that only 49% (235 articles) had information on the geographic area (Table 1) and the analyzed ecosystem (Table 2). Still, when we added country names to the original search we

Discussion

The scientific literature on ecosystem services, as analyzed using the Web of Science (2014) database, has grown exponentially from one article in 1991 (Ehrlich and Wilson, 1991) to 1500 articles in 2013 (Fig. 1). Although this impressive attention can be interpreted as a very good sign for those working on this issue, it also generates a problem. Ehrlich and Wilson (1991), Gómez-Baggethun et al. (2010) and Costanza et al. (2014) to name only a few references, agree that the concept is of

Acknowledgments

Authors were supported by a CONICYT-Chile grant (FONDECYT 1120005).

References (11)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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