Abstract

 The tropics host about 80% of the planet’s terrestrial species and over 95% of its corals. A well-known tropical forest ecosystem to provide significant global regulating services has declined at a rate of 5.5 M ha per year from 1990 to 2015, while another region noted an increase per year. This region is almost covered by developing countries which environmental literacy and research capacity are more fragile than the rest of the world. Despite these facts, there is evidence that tropical region ecosystem services and disservices are the least studied in the world. This study quantified none and peer review papers in the tropics, then analysed from peer review papers the neglected ecosystem type, service category, assessment mode, applied techniques and dependence analysis between ecosystem type, service category mode and techniques.

 The Google Scholar and Web of Science were used to collect all ES & ED studies in the form of articles, books, short communications, research reports and others were available online from 1960 to December 2017. This review covered 102 countries, 1061 studies, of which 578 were peer reviewed papers (articles) and 483 non-peer reviewed papers. The study showed a dramatic increase of articles in the last three years as more than 50% of articles were published after the year of 2014. The top countries in high articles were Mexico (n=53), India (n=43), and Brazil (n=35). The ES & ED assessment tools and techniques are barely applied in tropics as only social based techniques such as interviews and questionnaire take over 45%, while biophysical tools like remote sensing and GIS appeared only in 20%, InVEST only in 3% while the rest tools are less than 1% even none such as ARIES model. Urban and marine ecosystem types, disservices category and trade-off assessment mode were the least studied.

 The review concluded that thigh policy analysis ES & ED studies do not reflect the trade-offs and synergy analysis between different services which hinder the development of pragmatic policy and decisions toward ES sustainable management in the tropics. The rampant urbanisation in the tropics is subjected to destroy existing ES. Thus, this review highly suggested a high concern of urbanisation and its impacts on ecosystem services. This study also calls for great academic research to give attention to the tropical rainforest region as most African countries to host such forest have not even a single article on ES & ED.

Keywords: Ecosystem services; Disservices; Tropics, Country-basis; Choice dependence