Consistent ecosystem service bundles emerge across global mountain, island and delta systems

Ecosystem services are often analysed individually, but are intertwined with one another and the social-ecological systems they occur in. As a response, ecosystem service bundles, i.e. co-occurring sets of ecosystem services, can be used to simplify complex relationships between nature and society, and in turn aid understanding. Typically bundles are studied on the local to regional scale, given the importance of local context to bundling, but wider scale analysis may help highlight broader ecosystem service balances for sustainable management. However, it remains uncertain if the relationships between ecosystem services are strong enough to describe coherent bundles at the global scale, and the extent to which these bundles are robust across different social-ecological systems and within different biogeographical realms.

Here, we examine whether coherent bundles emerge from a set of 25 ecosystem property and service indicators across regional mountain, island and delta systems around the world. We analyse differences between bundle composition and correlation structure based on system, latitude and biome. We find consistent bundles broadly representing ‘food’, ‘productivity’ and biodiversity ‘intactness/soil’ ecosystem properties and services emerge across mountains, islands and deltas globally. These bundles show strong positive correlations internally, and consistent negative correlations between ‘food’ services and ‘intactness/soil’ ecosystem properties across bundles. The bundles weakened at higher latitudes and individual biomes where the division between ecosystem properties and services broke down. In sum, while islands, mountains and deltas are distinct social-ecological systems, we found ecosystem bundles robustly described synergies and trade-offs between ecosystem services across these systems. This suggests that bundling has a role in simplifying wider scale interactions between humans and ecosystem services.