Economic value of three grassland ecosystem services when managed at the regional and farm scale

Grasslands cover a major share of the world's agricultural land and their management influences ecosystem services. Spatially targeted policy instruments can increase the provision of ecosystem services by exploiting how they respond to spatial differences in environmental characteristics such as altitude, slope, or soil quality. However, most policy instruments focus on individual farms, where spatial differences are small. Here we assess the economic value of three grassland ecosystem services (i.e., forage provision, carbon sequestration, and habitat maintenance) and its variability in a Swiss region of 791 km