Abstract
BackgroundThe current biodiversity crisis calls for an urgent need to sustainably manage human uses of nature. The Ecosystem Services (ES) concept defined as « the benefits humans obtain from nature » support decisions aimed at promoting nature conservation. However, marine ecosystems, in particular, endure numerous direct pressures (e.g., habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation, pollution, climate change, and the introduction of non-indigenous species) all of which threaten ecosystem structure, functioning, and the very provision of ES. While marine ecosystems often receive less attention than terrestrial ecosystems in ES literature, it would also appear that there is a heterogeneity of knowledge within marine ecosystems and within the different ES provided. Hence, a systematic map on the existing literature will aim to highlight knowledge clusters and knowledge gaps on how changes in marine ecosystems influence the provision of marine ecosystem services. This will provide an evidence base for possible future reviews, and may help to inform eventual management and policy decision-making.MethodsWe will search for all evidence documenting how changes in structure and functioning of marine ecosystems affect the delivery of ES, across scientific and grey literature sources. Two bibliographic databases, Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection, will be used with a supplementary search undertaken in Google scholar. Multiple organisational websites related to intergovernmental agencies, supra-national or national structures, and NGOs will also be searched. Searches will be performed with English terms only without any geographic or temporal limitations. Literature screening, against predefined inclusion criteria, will be undertaken on title, abstract, and then full texts. All qualifying literature will be subjected to coding and meta-data extraction. No formal validity appraisal will be undertaken. Indeed, the map will highlight how marine ecosystem changes impact the ES provided. Knowledge gaps will be identified in terms of which ecosystem types, biodiversity components, or ES types are most or least studied and how these categories are correlated. Finally, a database will be provided, we will narratively describe this evidence base with summary figures and tables of pertinent study characteristics.
Highlights
The current biodiversity crisis calls for an urgent need to sustainably manage human uses of nature
Nature’s Contribution to People (NCP) and Ecosystem Services (ES) concepts have gained interest in their ability to highlight our dependency on nature and all the services we extract from it [2,3,4]
Defined as « the benefits humans obtain from nature » [6], the ES concept helps in producing knowledge to support decisions aimed at promoting nature conservation
Summary
This systematic map follows the methodological guidelines in accordance with the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence Guidelines and Standards for Evidence Synthesis [33] and conforms to the ‘RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses’ (ROSES) for Systematic Map Protocols presented by Haddaway et al [34] (See Additional file 1 for the ROSES systematic map template of this study). The search terms used for the sub-string on ES types includes different synonyms for each ES in order to be as inclusive as possible and comes from the different lists of marine ES based on Mongruel et al [13], Global Ocean Accounts Partnership [18], and Liquete et al [19]. The search terms for the sub-string on Exposure, which concerns changes in biodiversity (from species to marine ecosystems) are composed of key words synonymous to “change”. The search string was tested and constructed in Web of Science Core Collection (WOS) in order to have the highest efficiency and the best comprehensiveness related to the test list (See more in Additional file 2 for information of the building process of the search string).
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