Check our paper on ecosystem services just published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Ecosystem services have been extensively studied in recent decades. Most of the thousands of scholarly papers published on the subject have focused on describing the production, spatial extent, and valuation of such services. Human reliance on ecosystem services is a function of ecosystems’ capacity to supply and societal demand for these benefits. However, considerably more attention has been devoted to the supply side than to the demand for them. Sustainable land management depends on reconciling supply of and demand for ecosystem services among different stakeholders. The paper emphasizes the need of shifting our attention from the supply of ecosystem services to attaining a balance between supply and demand.
