Critical Zone Science Informs Landscape Management Through Quantification of Slow Episodic Constraints on Ecosystem Services

The critical zone supports many ecosystem services from which humans derive both direct and indirect benefits as a society, yet these processes that form over long periods of time are often neglected and are rarely quantified. Thus linking them to ecosystem services has lagged behind other ecosystem service assessment studies. Critical zone services extends the concept of ecosystem services to understand the maintenance of ecosystem services for future generations through measurement of processes operating at longer time scales and their interaction with fast processes. In this chapter, we ask how improved understanding of the critical zone and its services can be used to inform land management. We posit that integrating critical zone science into land management will assist in understanding and predicting the sustainability and/or disruption of natural services. To this end, we review critical zone science conducted at the NSF Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs) over the past 7 years and identify key areas in which critical zone science has advanced our understanding of ecosystem services. We find that intermediate scale (plot to landscape) measurements and modeling provided by CZOs are enhancing our understanding of climate, topography, and bedrock controls on fine-scale variability in ecosystem services. Measurements of slow variables (at deeper spatial and temporal scales) inform management of baseline rates that are key to predicting responses to extreme events, climate and land use change, and to sustaining services as the frequency of extreme events and disturbances increase.