Ecosystem services are the direct and indirect benefits humans obtain from nature, conventionally grouped into provisioning services such as food production and livestock supply, regulating services such as water purification, flood control and carbon sequestration, and cultural services such as recreation, aesthetics and spiritual value. These services sit at the centre of the FEW nexus because every food, energy and water system ultimately rests on them. Yet past assessments have treated the nexus unevenly. Food-related services are usually represented through provisioning functions, water-related services through regulating functions like water supply, soil erosion and sediment regulation, and energy through carbon sequestration and its indirect climate link. Cultural services, despite their growing recognition in resource governance, remain significantly underexplored, a research gap the new study explicitly targets.

The research team, led by authors publishing in One Ecosystem, set out to answer a deceptively practical question: when a practitioner, planner or researcher needs to assess ecosystem services for a food-energy-water problem, which tool should they pick, and how good are the candidates really? To do this, the study developed an integrated evaluation framework built on two complementary dimensions. The first is intradisciplinary robustness, which measures how well a tool aligns with core ecological principles and established methods within the ecosystem service assessment field. The second is interdisciplinary capacity, which captures a tool’s ability to integrate ecological, social and economic domains to inform the kind of complex systems governance the FEW nexus demands. As earlier scholars have argued, managing today’s socio-ecological systems requires both cross-disciplinary integration and disciplinary depth, yet much of the available knowledge remains siloed and underused.

The methodology combined a systematic literature review with expert-based evaluation and synthesis. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) standards, the team searched ScienceDirect, Web of Science and Google Scholar for literature published between 2005 and 2023, using consistent Boolean search terms combining ecosystem services, assessment tools and the food, energy, water and nexus keywords. The initial search yielded 138 records; after removing duplicates and screening titles and abstracts, 44 peer-reviewed articles and nine review papers were selected for full-text analysis. Inclusion criteria required that each study apply or evaluate an ecosystem service assessment tool in at least one FEW domain and that the tool remain active and publicly accessible as of December 2023. From this process, six tools emerged: ARIES, Co$tingNature, InVEST, SolVES, TESSA and the Value transfer method.

Each of the six tools brings a distinct technical profile. ARIES, or Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services, is a web-interface modelling platform that accommodates scenario analysis, spatial assessment, economic valuation, optimisation of payments for ecosystem services programmes and spatial policy planning, using semantic AI modelling to combine ecological, economic and spatial data. Co$tingNature is a web-based spatial analysis tool that assesses how land-cover and land-use change affect natural systems, providing global or local relative indexes alongside conservation prioritisation and monetary valuation. InVEST, the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs, is a suite of software models for mapping, modelling and quantifying ecosystem services in biophysical or monetary terms under different scenarios. SolVES, developed by the US Geological Survey, identifies, assesses and maps social values, capturing cultural services such as aesthetic, historical, therapeutic and recreational values through spatial and points-based survey responses. TESSA, the Toolkit for Ecosystem Service Site-based Assessment, is a manual offering rapid methods to estimate local benefits from nature, generating primary data through stakeholder participation. The Value transfer method, finally, is an environmental-economics technique that applies quantitative estimates of ecosystem service values from existing study sites to another policy site, assuming a constant unit value per hectare when detailed local information is unavailable.

The evaluation framework itself was technically precise. Intradisciplinary performance was scored against a single criterion: alignment with the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting-Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EA), the United Nations framework for integrating ecosystem services into national accounting. Tools were scored on five specific SEEA-EA account types: ecosystem extent accounts, ecosystem condition accounts, ecosystem services flow accounts in physical terms, flow accounts in monetary terms and monetary ecosystem asset accounts. Interdisciplinary performance was assessed across three criteria, assessment, awareness and accessibility, each structured around nine indicators: connectivity, innovation, equitability, participation, coordination, sharing, legitimacy, empowerment and strategy, each scored from one to five. Fourteen researchers with experience in food, energy, water and ecosystem service assessment, drawn from environmental science, ecology, sociology, economics, hydrology and policy across different regions, independently scored the six tools using the predefined matrices, after a pilot phase with three experts refined the scoring format.

The results revealed a striking asymmetry. Intradisciplinary scores varied enormously, from 4.5 for ARIES and 4 for SolVES down to 3.5 for InVEST, 2.5 for Co$tingNature, 2 for TESSA and just 1 for Value transfer, reflecting the clearly defined SEEA-EA benchmark. Interdisciplinary scores, by contrast, clustered narrowly between 2.4 and 3.8, with Co$tingNature at 3.8, ARIES and InVEST at 3.5, SolVES at 2.9, Value transfer at 2.8 and TESSA at 2.4. No tool achieved an interdisciplinary score above 4, suggesting that existing instruments primarily support only basic or preliminary integration of FEW systems. While some tools incorporate cross-sectoral interactions through scenario analysis or spatial modelling, they generally lack structured support for governance processes, mechanisms for stakeholder engagement or integration of institutional dimensions. The discrepancy also reflects the early stage of methodological development in interdisciplinary ecosystem service assessment within the nexus context, where criteria remain broader and less standardised than the accounting benchmarks.

Drilling into the interdisciplinary domains exposed further functional detail. Under the assessment criterion, connectivity and innovation both scored 3.48 while equitability lagged at 2.79, making equitability the most challenging dimension; ARIES and Co$tingNature showed stable, balanced performance, while InVEST, SolVES, TESSA and Value transfer varied substantially between domains. Under awareness, sharing was the strongest domain at 4.75, with a tight clustering of scores suggesting methodological consensus, whereas participation at 2.7 and coordination at 2.79 showed broader spreads and low outliers, indicating gaps in tool design. TESSA consistently performed at the upper end, excelling in participation and sharing, while InVEST, SolVES and Value transfer performed poorly in participation and coordination. Under accessibility, the domain scores fell to 2.77 overall, with median scores of roughly 3.55 for legitimacy, 1.9 for empowerment and 2.8 for strategy. Empowerment emerged as the weakest dimension of all, with most tools clustering between 1 and 3, pointing to a general lack of methodological depth in supporting empowerment-related objectives. InVEST performed consistently well across accessibility, while Value transfer and SolVES struggled across all three dimensions.

To translate these findings into practice, the study introduced a decision tree to guide tool selection based on FEW nexus needs, considering applicability to FEW domains, level of stakeholder engagement required, map-based outputs, capacity for data collection and synergies and conflicts analysis. The guidance is context-dependent: when users seek a comprehensive analysis of the nexus intricacies, InVEST emerges as the preferred tool, with ten FEW-relevant services including crop pollination, crop production, offshore wind energy, hydropower production, urban flood risk mitigation, water purification and wave energy. For stakeholder-engaged analysis, SolVES and TESSA excel, with SolVES offering cartography of perceived social values, while in scenarios devoid of stakeholder participation ARIES can furnish decision-making maps, and Co$tingNature, covering seven FEW-relevant services, can be employed for nuanced analyses of trade-offs and synergies. Tools with higher interdisciplinary scores tend to be more relevant for government actors addressing policy integration across FEW sectors, whereas tools with strong intradisciplinary performance suit evaluators and analysts engaged in detailed ecological or sector-specific assessments.

The study’s recommendations for future tool development are clear and ambitious. Tools must move beyond single-discipline optimisation and develop true modular architectures, enabling users to plug in models or datasets relevant to specific local or national contexts, with the flexibility of ARIES and InVEST serving as a design benchmark. Stakeholder engagement must be embedded from the outset through co-design processes and locally meaningful indicators, linking grassroots concerns to national or regional policy scenarios. Scenario modelling must become more interactive and uncertainty-aware, allowing users to explore trade-offs dynamically with real-time data and feedback loops. Inclusive design, through open-source code, customisable language settings and tiered user interfaces, can bridge technical divides, especially in low-capacity regions, while Value transfer techniques should be expanded with enhanced contextual calibration and clearer documentation of assumptions. The authors acknowledge that their reliance on expert elicitation with fourteen researchers, though valuable, may limit generalisability, and that respondent bias remains a methodological constraint. Still, the core message stands: existing tools primarily support only basic integration of FEW systems, cultural services remain underexplored, and the field urgently needs more comprehensive evaluation indicators and truly integrated, decision-oriented frameworks for sustainable resource management.

Subject of Research: Environmental Science

Article Title: Navigating ecosystem service assessment tool selection for food-energy-water nexus: An interdisciplinary versus intradisciplinary perspective

Article References: Yuan, M. H., Huang, T.-H., Fakour, H., Imani, M., & Chou, I. (2025). Navigating ecosystem service assessment tool selection for food-energy-water nexus: An interdisciplinary versus intradisciplinary perspective. One Ecosystem, 10, Article e159702. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.10.e159702

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.10.e159702

Keywords: ecosystem services, food-energy-water nexus, FEW nexus, ARIES, InVEST, SolVES, TESSA, Co$tingNature, value transfer, SEEA-EA, interdisciplinarity, decision tree