The ecosystem service cascade: Further developing the metaphor. Integrating societal processes to accommodate social processes and planning, and the case of bioenergy

The ‘cascade model’ of ecosystem service generation and valuation highlights the links between biophysical aspects/biodiversity and human well-being, in particular for the case of marginal changes, but does not include societal processes. Services seem to flow effortlessly from ecosystems to beneficiaries, as free gifts of nature. We integrate such processes, strengthening the model's applicability to non-incremental changes, and to landscape planning. A process analysis shows how use value attribution turns biophysical ecosystem functions into ecosystem service potentials which (except for ‘final services’) have to be mobilised to provide ecosystem services. Once appropriated, these services generate ecosystem benefits which may be commercialised, or not.