Integrating economic and ecological sciences into operational decision support systems is a key step for global conservation and sustainability. The perspective of ecosystem services (ES) - the services humans derive from nature - is a way to achieve this. Couching ES research within economic theory allows us to move to a more structured engagement between biophysical science, social science research and policy. Over the past decade ES research has become an important area of investigation. The number of papers addressing ecosystems services is rising exponentially, reaching a total of more than 500 by 2010. While on the international and European level many ecosystem service initiatives have started, at the national and regional scale only few attempts to evaluate ES had been conducted at the start of the ECOFRESH project in 2010.