Work

Ecosystem service bundles highlight priorities and trade-offs for marine spatial planning

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: There is an increasing demand for ecosystem service (ES) assessments as part of international and national efforts to enhance and safeguard the valuable benefits ecosystems provide. Despite the benefits that mankind derives from the oceans, relatively few such assessments have been carried out for marine and coastal ecosystems. Understanding which ESs occur together and where they co-occur can inform the design of spatially explicit marine policy. ES bundles analysis is an approach used to identify suites of services that tend to co-occur, and to capture synergies and trade-offs between services that can inform policy and planning. We perform ES bundles analysis for 10 ESs on the western Black Sea coast, including provisioning, regulating and maintenance, and cultural services. We use correlation analysis to understand relationships between services and cluster analysis to identify clusters of sites with distinct ES bundles. We find co-occurrence between multiple ESs, four coastal clusters and two offshore clusters of sites, which differ in their delivery of ESs. We demonstrate how the results of ES bundles analysis can be applied to inform marine spatial planning and marine protected area networks, and identify future multi-use areas to safeguard ES provision for a robust blue economy.

Source: Ecosystems and People

DOI: 10.1080/26395916.2026.2709841