CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

ABSTRACTThe multiple benefits that society receives from ecosystems have been studied in recent decades, and thousands of papers have been written on ecosystem services since the introduction of this concept. A main focus has been on describing the production of ecosystem services, their spatial extent and their valuation. Although the use of ecosystem services by humans is a function of the capacity of ecosystems to supply them and society to demand them, the supply side has received more attention than the demand. Sustainable land management depends on reconciling supply and demand for ecosystem services by different stakeholders. We analyzed the relationship between supply and demand in rangelands for the four ecosystem service types: provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural. We focused our analysis on rangelands, because they provide a great variety of ecosystem services and they include a myriad of stakeholders.We identified three main variables affecting human demands; income, place of residence, and level of education, and we described how the demand for ecosystem services in rangelands has diversified in the past decades from primarily provisioning services to now commonly including regulation and cultural services. This conceptual framework could guide research and the decision making process about land use in rangelands.