Ecosystem services and ecosystem degradation: environmentalist’s expectation

Abstract

In this article, we explore the connections between ecosystem degradation and ecosystem services. We discuss an operational definition of ecosystem degradation and applied it to the terrestrial ecosystem of Chiloe Island (southern Chile). Results show that provisioning services correlated positively with degradation (the en-vironmentalist's paradox) while regulating and maintenance services showed the opposite trend (the environmentalist's expectation). We propose, given these contextual results, that there is more than one type of relationship between degradation and services and that this field of study could learn more from local, context oriented studies, than large-scale analyses.