MobilES - Using mobile-phone technology to capture ecosystem service information

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Despite being vital for human well-being, ecosystem services (ES) - nature's contributions to people - are increasingly threatened by human activities (e.g. overexploitation and degradation). The importance of ES is globally recognised. For example, 127 United Nation member states have signed up to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES; www.ipbes.net). Cambodia (a rapidly developing nation with a high reliance on the agricultural sector but experiencing increasing urbanisation) is among these signatories and has further demonstrated its willingness and commitment to work towards sustainable development by several national-level policies (e.g. National Policy and Strategic Plan on Green Growth). However, the Royal Government of Cambodia has identified a need for more information on how to better manage availability, access, utilisation and stability of ES, arising from a historical bias within ES science (implicitly a social-ecological system linking nature and people) towards ecology at the expense of social science.We use mobile phone surveys administered along the rural-urban spectrum to investigate how people access and use ES, from which ecosystems, how such benefits contribute to people's well-being, how barriers prevent or reduce these benefits, the sustainability of each of these processes, and by identifying pathways to resilience. We will incorporate social science theories into flows and use of ES to transform existing ES models, establishing a step-change in ES research that shifts the focus from natural ecosystems to human beneficiaries.Finally, as well as providing insight into ES access, use and resilience across the rural-urban spectrum, we will validate our technological, smartphone-based approach. Utilising mobile technology to distribute surveys has many potential benefits, including: 1) enabling participants to respond to surveys at a time that suits them , therefore allowing the inclusion of vulnerable groups who can ill afford time away from work to participate; 2) capturing spatially and temporally distinct links between people and nature, which may be unique to the individual and shift over time; and 3) having the potential to be up-scaled, enabling for the inclusion of social science 'big data' in ES models. Thus, once properly validated, the smartphone-based method of data collection is inherently scalable and so might enable social science data to be collected over large regions and incorporated into models to address questions about the impacts of ecosystem change on the multidimensional well-being of regional and social-economic groups across scales.In partnership with decision-makers, the advances suggested here could help to ensure ES research contributes to and informs ongoing policy processes (e.g. IPBES) and facilitates the development of ES indicators for monitoring of human well-being and building pathways to resilience in Cambodia and beyond.