Mapping synergies and trade-offs among ecosystem services in the Australian Capital Region

Any particular area in a landscape provides multiple ecosystem services. As we attempt to extract more ecosystem services out of a landscape for example, the storage of carbon, crop production for food and biofuels, and the conservation of biodiversity conflicts often arise regarding choice of dominant land use. Evaluation of synergies and trade-offs among potentially competing or complementary land uses ultimately depends on the value given to ecosystem services by the people inhabiting the landscape, or by those extracting ecosystem services from afar. To help societies make such difficult choices, a quantitative, spatially explicit determination of the ecosystem services provided by a landscape is valuable. Understanding and quantifying the relationships among and trade-offs between different ecosystem services has therefore become a very active area of research (e.g., Naidoo and Ricketts 2006; Bennett et al. 2009).