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

Natural pest control is an ecosystem service that appears to be affected by ecosystem characteristics at spatial scales from field to landscape. Changes in land use and land management at the field level to enhance pest control depend on a small number of decision makers. In contrast, changes at the landscape level involve multiple stakeholders, multiple objectives and biophysical interactions among multiple scales. Natural pest control is then one of a set of ecosystem services that needs to be addressed simultaneously, often in a negotiation setting. Science has a role to play by bringing together knowledge that informs decision making based on insight in trade-offs and win-win situations, and the associated land use patterns. To enable such an integrated assessment of ecosystem services an approach is needed that can deal with multiple scales, multiple objectives and multi-stakeholder settings. Here we describe an integrated, spatially explicit land use assessment approach named Landscape IMAGES. We illustrate the approach for a case study with spatially implicit and spatially explicit indicators and describe how natural pest control can be accommodated.