CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The crucial role of biodiversity in the links between ecosystemsand societies has been repeatedly highlighted both as source ofwellbeing and as a target of human actions, but not all aspects ofbiodiversity are equally important to different ecosystem services.Similarly, different social actors have different perceptions of andaccess to ecosystem services, and therefore, they have differentwants and capacities to select directly or indirectly for particularbiodiversity and ecosystem characteristics. Their choices feedback onto the ecosystem services provided to all parties involvedand in turn, affect future decisions. Despite this recognition, theresearch communities addressing biodiversity, ecosystem services,and human outcomes have yet to develop frameworks thatadequately treat the multiple dimensions and interactions in therelationship. Here, we present an interdisciplinary framework forthe analysis of relationships between functional diversity, ecosystemservices, and human actions that is applicable to specific socialenvironmental systems at local scales. We connect the mechanisticunderstanding of the ecological role of diversity with its socialrelevance: ecosystem services. The framework permits connectionsbetween functional diversity components and priorities of socialactors using land use decisions and ecosystem services as the mainlinks between these ecological and social components. We proposea matrix-based method that provides a transparent and flexibleplatform for quantifying and integrating social and ecological informationand negotiating potentially conflicting land uses amongmultiple social actors. We illustrate the applicability of our frameworkby way of land use examples from temperate to subtropicalSouth America, an area of rapid social and ecological change.