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How are ecosystem services conceptualized, analyzed, and forecast into the future? How can ecosystem service science be advanced to improve environmental decision-making at all scales? In this paper, I focus on three critical challenges in ecosystem service science that must be addressed to better understand, forecast, and manage ecosystem services. These include (1) understanding the role of nonlinearities, feedbacks, and legacies in the sustainable and resilient provision of ecosystem services; (2) understanding the role and interplay of ecological and social components in the provision of ecosystem services; and (3) employing stakeholder knowledge in co-designing research that better addresses decision-makers’ most pressing questions. Addressing these three challenges will advance ecosystem science and improve the use of ecosystem services in understanding and managing ecosystems.

Research on urban ecosystems rapidly expanded in the 1990s and is now a central topic in ecosystem science. In this paper, we argue that there are two critical challenges for ecosystem science that are rooted in urban ecosystems: (1) predicting or explaining the assembly and function of novel communities and ecosystems under altered environmental conditions and (2) refining understanding of humans as components of ecosystems in the context of integrated social-ecological systems. We assert that these challenges are also linchpins in the further development of sustainability science and argue that there is a strong need for a new initiative in urban systems science to address these challenges and catalyze the next wave of fundamental advances in ecosystem science, and more broadly in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary science.

Growing trade among nations is globalizing economies and driving environmental change. As a consequence, trade affects ecosystems, but trade is not currently a major topic in ecosystem research based on a survey of ecological journals. This survey reveals trade is rarely a title word or topic except for studies considering the movement of species or sustainability. However, when trade is considered at large scales, ecosystem mass balances are significantly influenced by traded products such as the nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizers and livestock feeds. Trade also depletes resource species leading to ecosystem alterations such as the elimination of large predators and filter feeders in aquatic ecosystems and landscape conversion with attendant changes in biogeochemistry and biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems. Trade is a source of alien species introductions. Trade also creates telecouplings among distant locations that cause changes in ecosystems including changes that may affect whether an ecosystem is a source or sink in relation to atmospheric carbon dioxide. There is a need for improved data tracing traded products, understanding the linkages of trade between ecosystem sources and sinks, and developing new methods and models to analyze trade impacts. Studies of trade impacts in relation to questions about changing ecological processes and the trajectory of ecosystems represent an important frontier.

Estuarine ecosystem ecology is a dynamic field of study that has historically focused on a spectrum of compelling research topics, and here we present a series of perspectives on the major challenges to be overcome and key research questions to be addressed toward making progress over the coming decades. The challenges we identify include (1) maintaining and improving spatially distributed time-series datasets, (2) maximizing innovation by harnessing new technologies, (3) resuscitating experimental ecosystem research for estuaries, (4) integrating diagnostic ecological models into ecosystem research, and (5) improving basic science by linking it to applied research. We also raise a number of key research questions for the field, including (1) how does food web function respond to changing climate and nutrients, (2) what are likely trajectories of ecosystem recovery in response to restoration, (3) how does climate alter seasonality of estuarine ecosystem processes, (4) how do estuaries affect the global carbon budget and what are key feedbacks, and (5) how will tidal wetland ecosystems respond to sea level rise and climate change? Looking ahead, we envision that the field of estuarine ecosystem ecology will continue to build upon its rich tradition to address fundamental research questions with an expanded toolkit and enlightened perspective to focus basic science on the knowledge needs of society.

Marine ecosystem science has developed since the 1940s, when humans obtained the ability to spend substantial time underneath the surface of the ocean. Since then, and drawing on several decades of scientific advances, a number of exciting research frontiers have emerged. We find: Understanding interacting drivers of change, Identifying thresholds in ecosystems, and Investigating social-ecological dynamics to represent particularly interesting frontiers, which we speculate will soon emerge as new mainstreams in marine ecosystem science. However, increasing human impacts on ecosystems everywhere and a new level of global connectivity are shifting the context for studying, understanding, and managing marine ecosystems. As a consequence, we argue that ecosystem scientists today also need to address a number of critical challenges and devote new energy and expertise to Modeling the Anthropocene, Operationalizing resilience, and Understanding social-ecological dynamics across scales. This new deep dive into unknown waters requires a number of strategies to be successful. We suggest that marine ecosystem scientists need to actively: Prepare for the unexpected, cross boundaries, and understand our cognitive limitations to further develop the exciting field of marine ecosystem science.

The challenges of the Anthropocene have forced ecologists into the public space, to contend with issues manifest at scales of tens of kilometers and more, unfolding over decades to centuries. Our long fascination with issues of scale is no longer academic. We need to be able to aggregate observations and process understanding derived at the scale of a homogeneous patch to the landscape, region, and the world, and disaggregate changes and limits at the planetary scale to their local outcomes and responses. Several robust approaches to scale-appropriate research and translation in ecology are becoming widely used, but the observation technologies have in some respects outrun both the theory and the general practice for scaling up and scaling down. The project for the next decade is to work simultaneously at multiple scales, using mechanistic, reduced-form, and empirical models to link the scales. The issues related to scale transitions are a manifestation in the spatial and temporal domain of the general problem of ‘emergence,’ which remains suspect in ecology, because it seems to invoke an element of magic. A key challenge for all complex system science, including ecology, is to make the prediction of patterns at one scale from mechanisms operating at different scales into a respectable and reliable practice.

Northern ecosystem processes play out across scales that are rare elsewhere on contemporary earth: large ranging predator–prey systems are still operational, invasive species are rare, and large-scale natural disturbances occur extensively. Disturbances in the far north affect huge areas of land and are difficult to control or manage. Historically, disturbance patterns and processes ranging across a number of spatio-temporal scales have played an important role in the resilience of northern ecosystems. However, due to interactions with a warming climate, these disturbances are now erasing key legacies of the last millennia of ecosystem processes. Building on the concepts of legacies and cross-scale interactions, we highlight several general conceptual issues that represent key challenges for the future of northern ecosystem science, but that also have relevance to other biomes.

Few things are more defining in a landscape compared to the absence or presence of trees, both in aesthetic and in functional terms. At the same time, tree cover has been profoundly affected by humans since ancient times. It is therefore not surprising that opinions about deforestation and colonization of landscapes by trees have always been strong. Although loss of forests is often lamented, there is also profound cultural affection for open landscapes including some that have been deforested in the past. Here we take a historical view on perceptions of changing tree cover, and subsequently argue that the current ecological literature on forest-savanna-grassland transitions is not immune to value-laden perspectives. So far, ecosystem science has not done enough to analyze the effects of tree cover changes on ecosystem services and indicators of human well-being. Until these analyses are done, debates about forested versus open landscapes will be clashes of values rather than scientific evaluations. We discuss how ecosystem science may contribute to developing this field.

Organisms not only respond to their environment but also influence the availability of resources and change environmental conditions. Hence, the impacts of organisms on their environment shape the selective regimes that drive, on ecological time scales, the assembly of ecological communities and, on evolutionary time scales, diversification. Recent studies have drawn attention to the fact that feedbacks between organisms and the environment can prevent or induce catastrophic transitions in ecosystem states and argue that climate change increases the likelihood of such catastrophic regime shifts. Ecologists have very limited ability to predict the likelihood of such regime shifts or the properties of the ecosystems that assemble after such collapses. This is because ecology does not have a theory of ecosystem assembly, nor does it have an established way of translating such a theory into models capable of predicting future ecosystem states. Without knowing these potential endpoints, we cannot develop strategies for coercing ecosystems into desired states, severely constraining our capacity to mitigate climate change and climate change impacts. This paper outlines a roadmap for developing a theory of terrestrial ecosystem assembly. Recent progress in dynamic global vegetation modelling and community assembly provides a useful foundation for a theory of ecosystem assembly. Environmental filtering and limiting similarity are key principles, but to be useful, they need to be linked to resource consumption and environmental modulation, and be more strongly constrained by biophysics and the trade-offs defined by biophysical principles. Such a theory recognises that ecological and evolutionary history ensures that many different ecosystem assemblies are possible at any given point in space and time.