Ecosystem services research in contrasting socio-ecological contexts of Argentina:Critical assessment and future directions

MASTRANGELO, MATIAS; WEYLAND, FEDERICO; HERRERA, LORENA; VILLARINO, SEBASTIAN; BARRAL, PAULA; AUER, ALEJANDRA

Ecosystem Services

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2015 vol. 16 p. 63 - 73

In Argentina, agricultural expansion and intensification has stimulated the utilization of the ecosystem services (ES) approach to understand the consequences of land-use and land-cover changes. However, Argentina´s increasing trends of environmental degradation and social conflict due to agriculture continue unabated. Here we critically assess how the ES approach has been used in Argentina in order to identify areas for improvement and propose guidelines to increase the policy-relevance of ES research. We qualitatively analyzed 22 published studies that used the ES approach in two contrasting socio-ecological contexts in Argentina where agriculture has exerted profound but differential changes: the temperate Pampean and the subtropical extra-Pampean regions. We found a deeper integration of the biophysical and socio-cultural components of the ES cascade framework, a greater consideration of the local socio-ecological context and a higher applicability of knowledge to decision-making in ES studies performed in the extra-Pampean regions, where agriculture is rapidly expanding at the expense of native ecosystems. We propose that the ES research community should: (i) allocate more efforts to interdisciplinary research, (ii) invest in actively engaging stakeholders in the research process through transdisciplinary approaches, and (iii) strengthen the bi-directional flow of information between research and management through long-term and place-based studies.