Ecosystem services must tackle anthropized ecosystems and ecological engineering

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Résumé

The notion of ecosystem service is meant to better link human societies to ecological systems and to
serve has a tool for decision making. However, the notion has never been applied in a comprehensive
and consistent way to anthropized ecosystems while most ecosystems are indeed anthropized. This
means that in initiatives of ecosystem service assessment anthropized ecosystems are either neglected
or their services assessed in a misleading way. For example, services from cultivated lands are usually
valued through the value of the agricultural production, while this production highly depends on inputs
(fertilizers, pesticides, non-renewable sources of energy) and human work that cannot be assimilated to
ecological factors. Moreover, these practices have negative impacts such as the emission of greenhouse
gases, nutrient leaching to other ecosystems or loss of soil fertility. Hence, we present here a general
framework that could be used to assess the ecosystem services provided by anthropized ecosystems.
This framework is based on the joint assessment of ecological services, disservices, losses of natural
capital and impacts on other ecosystems. We show that this framework is required to assess different
practices to manipulate an ecosystem, e.g. low- vs high-input agriculture, or different ecosystems with
different levels of anthropization, e.g. manage forest vs. cropland. Indeed, ecosystems function in such
a complex way that human manipulations and natural ecological processes are tightly intermingled so
that services and disservices arising solely from ecological processes cannot be separated from the result
of human manipulations.

Mots-clés

Ecosystem services, Ecosystem, Total human ecosystem, Natural capital, Environmental resource management, Environmental science, Ecology, Geography, Ecosystem health, Biology