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The benefits nature provides to people, called ecosystem services, are increasingly recognized and accounted for in assessments of infrastructure development, agricultural management, conservation prioritization, and sustainable sourcing. These assessments are often limited by data, however, a gap with tremendous potential to be filled through Earth observations (EO), which produce a variety of data across spatial and temporal extents and resolutions. Despite widespread recognition of this potential, in practice few ecosystem service studies use EO. Here, we identify challenges and opportunities to using EO in ecosystem service modeling and assessment. Some challenges are technical, related to data awareness, processing, and access. These challenges require systematic investment in model platforms and data management. Other challenges are more conceptual but still systemic; they are byproducts of the structure of existing ecosystem service models and addressing them requires scientific investment in solutions and tools applicable to a wide range of models and approaches. We also highlight new ways in which EO can be leveraged for ecosystem service assessments, identifying promising new areas of research. More widespread use of EO for ecosystem service assessment will only be achieved if all of these types of challenges are addressed. This will require non-traditional funding and partnering opportunities from private and public agencies to promote data exploration, sharing, and archiving. Investing in this integration will be reflected in better and more accurate ecosystem service assessments worldwide., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Forest fragmentation can lead to habitat reduction, edge increase, and exposure to disturbances. A key emerging policy to protect forests is payments for ecosystem services (PES), which offers compensation to landowners for environmental stewardship. Mexico was one of the first countries to implement a broad-scale PES program, enrolling over 2.3 Mha by 2010. However, Mexico's PES did not completely eliminate deforestation in enrolled parcels and could have increased incentives to hide deforestation in ways that increased fragmentation. We studied whether Mexican forests enrolled in the PES program had less forest fragmentation than those not enrolled, and whether the PES effects varied among forest types, among socioeconomic zones, or compared to the protected areas system. We analyzed forest cover maps from 2000 to 2012 to calculate forest fragmentation. We summarized fragmentation for different forest types and in four socioeconomic zones. We then used matching analysis to investigate the possible causal impacts of the PES on forests across Mexico and compared the effects of the PES program with that of protected areas. We found that the area covered by forest in Mexico decreased by 3.4% from 2000 to 2012, but there was 9.3% less forest core area. Change in forest cover was highest in the southern part of Mexico, and high-stature evergreen tropical forest lost the most core areas (-17%), while oak forest lost the least (-2%). Our matching analysis found that the PES program reduced both forest cover loss and forest fragmentation. Low-PES areas increased twice as much of the number of forest patches, forest edge, forest islets, and largest area of forest lost compared to high-PES areas. Compared to the protected areas system in Mexico, high-PES areas performed similarly in preventing fragmentation, but not as well as biosphere reserve core zones. We conclude that the PES was successful in slowing forest fragmentation at the regional and country level. However, the program could be improved by targeting areas where forest changes are more frequent, especially in southern Mexico. Fragmentation analyses should be implemented in other areas to monitor the outcomes of protection programs such as REDD+ and PES., (© 2018 by the Ecological Society of America.)

Natural resource managers are often expected to achieve both environmental protection and economic development even when there are fundamental trade-offs between these goals. Adaptive management provides a theoretical structure for program administrators to balance social priorities in the presence of trade-offs and to improve conservation targeting. We used the case of Mexico's federal Payments for Hydrological Services program (PSAH) to illustrate the importance of adaptive management for improving program targeting. We documented adaptive elements of PSAH and corresponding changes in program eligibility and selection criteria. To evaluate whether these changes resulted in enrollment of lands of high environmental and social priority, we compared the environmental and social characteristics of the areas enrolled in the program with the characteristics of all forested areas in Mexico, all areas eligible for the program, and all areas submitted for application to the program. The program successfully enrolled areas of both high ecological and social priority, and over time, adaptive changes in the program's criteria for eligibility and selection led to increased enrollment of land scoring high on both dimensions. Three factors facilitated adaptive management in Mexico and are likely to be generally important for conservation managers: a supportive political environment, including financial backing and encouragement to experiment from the federal government; availability of relatively good social and environmental data; and active participation in the review process by stakeholders and outside evaluators., (© 2014 Society for Conservation Biology.)