The Organizing Framework of Ecosystem Services and its use in River Management

An Ecosystem Services approach can be used as an organizing framework to enhance the management of ecosystems, as multiple values and trade-offs can be identified and communicated through an ecosystem services lens. This can support more systemic, rather than incremental, planning, decision-making, and longer term value propositions. As rivers and their catchments/watersheds (RCW) are the lifeblood of many ecosystems, ecosystem services must adequately be taken into account in RCW planning, decision-making, and management to sustain and/or enhance this important natural capital. In this literature review, we discuss if/how an ecosystem services lens has been applied in the peer reviewed literature in the context of RCW management. Overall, the results reveal continual increases worldwide in the popularity and importance of considering ecosystem services in terms of RCW. Our findings also reveal that most of these studies have focussed on the themes of modelling, valuation, and/or mapping, but have not necessarily comprehensively used all three. We conclude that there is room for an ecosystem services approach to reach its full potential as an organizing framework, in particular across regions/countries and at multiple levels of scale.