Balancing competing ecosystem services requires stakeholder involvement and actions on different spatial scales

Ecosystem services (ES) are highly important for human wellbeing, but many grassland ES show trade- offs that are strengthened by management intensification. For example, high forage production conflicts with many cultural ES as well as the conservation of grassland biodiversity. Balancing these competing services is thus required to ensure that ES supply meets societal demand. This poses the question of how to achieve such a balance in the future. We discuss how involving stakeholders and implementing ES-enhancing actions at landscape, farm, and field scales can contribute to tackling this urgent question. First, multi-stakeholder approaches are required to assess prioritisation of ES to understand societal ES demand, to design multi-functional landscapes, and to motivate farmers to increase insufficiently supplied ES. Second, different actions need to be implemented across spatial scales, with the landscape being crucial to balance ES by spatial targeting of different grassland types. In addition, actions to enhance ES that are in short supply can and must be taken at farm and field scale. Therefore, all three spatial scales should be considered to balance competing grassland ES. Our synthesis provides not only a framework for improved balancing of ES, but also gives applied examples how this can be achieved.