Indonesia’s new planned capital in East Kalimantan is being touted as a “smart, green, beautiful and sustainable city” but has stoked fears of massive environmental damage to the island of Borneo, one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots and carbon sinks.

Amid climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity, there is the growing need to draw synergies between micro-scale environmental processes and practices, and macro-level ecosystem dynamics to facilitate conservation decision-making.

Land surface models (LSMs) predict how terrestrial fluxes of carbon, water, and energy change with abiotic drivers to inform the other components of Earth system models. Here, we focus on a single human-dominated watershed in southwestern Michigan, USA.

This study presents an integrated examination of both the ecosystem services (ES) and ecosystem disservices (EDS) associated with smallholder animal husbandry in rural livelihoods in three villages in southeast South Africa.