Understanding agricultural ecosystem services with ARIES (ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services): Perspectives for assisted policy making

Introduction Agricultural practices depend on ecosystem services (ES; Farber et al., 2006) and at the same time produce new ecosystem services. Because the dynamics, spatial and temporal scales, and range of values of ecosystem services production and usage are not well understood, it is difficult to locate agriculture within a broader context of ecosystem services-informed policy making. As a result, agricultural policy making often lacks understanding of the shortand long-term repercussions of decisions taken on the overall portfolio of valuable services produced by nature and necessary for human well-being. ARIES (Ecoinformatics Collaboratory, 2008) is a new methodology and web application meant to assess ecosystem services and illuminate their values to humans in order to make environmental decisions easier and more effective. By creating ad-hoc, probabilistic models of both provision and usage of ES in a region of interest, ARIES helps discover, understand, and quantify environmental assets, their likely beneficiaries, and what factors influence their