Optimizing Wetland Futures: A Meta-Analysis of Ecosystem Services Trade-offs

Wetland ecosystem services face considerable impacts from global change. Despite this, a comprehensive assessment examining their collective response to global change drivers has been lacking. Our study addressed this knowledge gap by integrating 30 meta-analyses, encompassing 4387 unique pairwise comparisons, within a second-order meta-analysis. We evaluated how seven wetland ecosystem services respond to various experimental treatments. We found that, while most treatments positively influenced multiple services. Phosphorus addition alone demonstrated a significant capacity to suppress greenhouse gas emissions. Key indicators such as gross primary productivity, microbial biomass nitrogen, ecosystem respiration, and total nitrogen effectively captured the dynamics of wetland ecosystem services. Our findings underscore the potential for achieving balanced, simultaneous enhancements across multiple wetland ecosystem services under global change. This research thereby offers a critical theoretical foundation for understanding wetland ecosystem responses and for developing informed management strategies toward maintaining healthy wetland ecosystem services.