Lands devoted to military use are globally important for the production of ecosystem services and for the conservation of biodiversity. The United States has one of the largest military land estates in the world, and most of these areas occur in water‐limited landscapes. Despite many of these areas receiving intense or sustained disturbance from military training activities, the structure and function of ecosystems contained within their boundaries continue to provide critical benefits to people across spatial scales. The land owned and managed by the Department of Defense is subject to regulation across local, state, and federal governing bodies, constraining and shaping both how land management is conducted and how ecosystem services are prioritized. Here, we explored the supply of ecosystem services from military lands in dryland areas of the United States using key indicators of ecosystem services: biodiversity estimates derived from range maps, ecosystem productivity estimates from satellite observations, and spatially explicit, hierarchical ecosystem classifications. Additionally, we utilized content analysis of the environmental management plans of these areas to describe the unique set of demands and regulatory constraints on these areas. We found that the US military land estate in drylands contains many types of ecosystems and provides a large and diverse supply of ecosystem services, comparable to the sum of services from public lands in these areas. Additionally, the degree to which the ecosystem services concept is captured in environmental management plans is strongly shaped by the language of the governing legislation that mandated the use of environmental management plans in these areas, although these plans do not explicitly address land management using the concept of ecosystem services. Collectively, our findings suggest that military use and management of land represents an important source of ecosystem services, that military land use can be considered a cultural ecosystem service unto itself, and that top‐down regulation can affect how these services are identified and valued. Our work highlights the need for the research and conservation communities to quantify ecosystem services from individual military installations so that both services and biodiversity can be safeguarded in an era of military conflict across the globe.

中文翻译：

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美国西部军方管理旱地的生态系统服务指标


专门用于军事用途的土地对于生产生态系统服务和保护生物多样性具有全球重要性。美国拥有世界上最大的军事地产之一，其中大部分地区都位于缺水的景观中。尽管其中许多地区受到军事训练活动的强烈或持续干扰，但其边界内生态系统的结构和功能继续为各个空间尺度的人们带来关键利益。国防部拥有和管理的土地受地方、州和联邦管理机构的监管，限制和塑造了土地管理的进行方式和生态系统服务的优先顺序。在这里，我们使用生态系统服务的关键指标探讨了美国旱地军事用地对生态系统服务的供应：从范围图得出的生物多样性估计、从卫星观测得出的生态系统生产力估计以及空间上明确的分层生态系统分类。此外，我们利用对这些区域环境管理计划的内容分析来描述这些区域的独特需求和监管限制。我们发现，美国在干旱地区的军事土地包含多种类型的生态系统，并提供了大量多样的生态系统服务，可与这些地区的公共土地的服务总和相媲美。 此外，环境管理计划中对生态系统服务概念的体现程度在很大程度上受到要求在这些地区使用环境管理计划的管理立法的语言的影响，尽管这些计划并未明确涉及使用生态系统服务概念的土地管理。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明，军事使用和土地管理是生态系统服务的重要来源，军事土地使用本身可以被视为一种文化生态系统服务，并且自上而下的监管可以影响这些服务的识别和估值。我们的工作强调，研究和保护界需要量化单个军事设施的生态系统服务，以便在全球军事冲突时代保护服务和生物多样性。