%0 Journal Article %A Heera Lee %A Sven Lautenbach %T A quantitative review of relationships between ecosystem services %D 2015 %R 10.1101/017467 %J bioRxiv %P 017467 %X Each decision in natural resources management can generate trade-offs with respect to the provisioning of ecosystem services. If the increase of one ecosystem service happens directly or indirectly at the cost of another ecosystem service, an attempt to maximize the provision of a single ecosystem service might lead to sub-optimal results. The research on trade-offs between ecosystem services has recently gained increasing attention in the scientific community. However, a synthesis on existing knowledge and knowledge gaps is missing so far. We aim at closing that gap by a quantitative review of 385 pairwise combinations of ecosystem services that have been studied in 60 case studies that report on relationships between ecosystem services. We categorized relationships between these pairs of ecosystem services into the categories “trade-off”, “synergy” or “no-effect”. A synergistic relationship was dominant between different regulating services and between different cultural services, whereas the relationship between regulating and provisioning services was trade-off dominated. Increases in cultural services did not influence provisioning services (”no-effect”). We further analyzed the pattern of relationships between ecosystem services across scales, land system archetypes and methods used to determine the relationship. Our analysis showed that the overall pattern of relationships between ecosystem services did not change significantly with scale and land system archetypes. However, some pairs of ecosystem services showed changes in relationships with scale. The choice of methods used to determine the relationship had an effect on the direction of the relationship insofar as multivariate approaches did un-derestimate “no-effect” relationships. More than half of the case studies were conducted at the regional scale, and case studies were biased towards Europe, North America and Australia, which might affect our ability to find the effect of scale or land system archetypes on the pattern of relationships. Our results provide helpful information of which services to include in ecosystem services assessments for the scientific community as well as for practitioners. Further-more, they allow a first check if critical trade-offs have been considered in an analysis. %U https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/04/04/017467.full.pdf