Towards integrated assessment of natural pest control as part of a setof ecosystem services: the Landscape IMAGES approach

Abstract: Natural pest control is an ecosystem service that appears to be affected by ecosystemcharacteristics at spatial scales from field to landscape. Changes in land use and landmanagement at the field level to enhance pest control depend on a small number of decisionmakers. In contrast, changes at the landscape level involve multiple stakeholders, multipleobjectives and biophysical interactions among multiple scales. Natural pest control is then one ofa set of ecosystem services that needs to be addressed simultaneously, often in a negotiationsetting. Science has a role to play by bringing together knowledge that informs decision makingbased on insight in trade-offs and win-win situations, and the associated land use patterns. Toenable such an integrated assessment of ecosystem services an approach is needed that can dealwith multiple scales, multiple objectives and multi-stakeholder settings. Here we describe anintegrated, spatially explicit land use assessment approach named Landscape IMAGES. Weillustrate the approach for a case study with spatially implicit and spatially explicit indicators anddescribe how natural pest control can be accommodated.