As a consequence of the global increase in economic and societal prosperity, ecosystems and natural resources have been substantially exploited, degraded, or even destroyed in the last century.
Furthermore, newly emerging management objectives provide evidence of changing societal preferences for ecosystem services: Managing ecosystems to lower the atmospheric greenhouse gas content, which is currently an important issue of ecosystem management (e.g., in agriculture and forestry), was not on the agenda of managers only a couple of decades ago.
Finding a path that reconciles this production with other societal values (biodiversity, ecosystem services) will remain an ongoing challenge.
River-floodplain systems are known to provide important societal functions and ecosystem services to mankind, such as production of vegetative biomass.
Future experiments should test the effects of alternative selection cutting upon structural heterogeneity, diversity and productivity to balance the varied societal demands of ecosystem services expected from forest management.
Iterations through this cycle allow goals to be revised periodically, enabling the accommodation of changing societal demands for ecosystem services.
As a result of societal changes, particular ecosystem services can rapidly gain in importance, sometimes at the cost of others.
Holistic approaches are called for that recognize the fundamentally interdependent nature of health and other societal, developmental, and ecosystem related factors in human communities.
Reductionist approaches tend to overlook these interdependencies and the trade-offs communities make between human health and their societal, cultural, and ecosystem environments, and it has been pointed out that the resulting solutions often turn out to be only a temporary relief, and can lead to new levels of problems [ 10, 11].
HANPP maps the intensity of societal use of ecosystems in a spatially explicit manner.
