The future of nature's contributions: A recent Global Assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has emphasized the urgent need to determine where and how nature's contribution matters most to people. Chaplin-Kramer et al. have developed a globalscale modeling of ecosystem services, focusing on water quality regulation, coastal protection, and crop pollination (see the Perspective by Balvanera). By 2050, up to 5 billion people may be at risk from diminishing ecosystem services, particularly in Africa and South Asia. Science , this issue p. 255 ; see also p. 184

Soil loss prevention is an important ecosystem service for protecting human and environmental health. Using spatiotemporal climate and environmental data of the Eastern Gobi Steppe, a region missing from previous studies of Mongolian wind-based soil erosion, we implemented the Revised Wind Erosion Equation (RWEQ) model to estimate soil loss. A replicable pipeline was developed to perform these computations, and made available openly. Soil loss was estimated on a monthly basis to analyze seasonal variations. The results show that the annual total soil loss was 61 × 10¹⁰ kg over an area of 69.3 × 10³ km², which is about 90 tonnes per hectare. Increasing fractional vegetation coverage to a uniform 50% coverage (doubling current vegetation coverage in every 1 km²) could reduce soil loss by 60%, highlighting the importance of protecting and increasing vegetation coverage in ecosystem service preservation.

Reforestation is an important strategy for nature-based climate solutions and identifying carbon storage potential of different locations is critical to its success. Applying average carbon values from forest inventories ignores the spatial heterogeneity in forest carbon and the effects of forest edges on carbon storage degradation. Here we show how spatially-explicit, predictive carbon modeling, that leverages satellite, social and biogeophysical datasets, can be used to identify more efficient restoration opportunities for climate mitigation than area-based carbon stock averages. Accounting for regeneration of forest edges, in addition to reforestation, boosts estimates of potential carbon gains by more than 20%. The total potential carbon gain that could be achieved through reforestation at the level indicated by the Bonn Challenge (350Mha) is 51 Gt CO ₂ -eq, but the “missing carbon” in our current forests accounts for 64.6 Gt CO ₂ -eq globally; the greatest potential carbon gains are found in areas of high fragmentation.

Preprint of paper On the usefulness of map-based dashboards for decision making.Submitted to IEEE Transactions on visualizations and computer graphics, July 2020