Ecosystem services are the natural processes responsible for clean air, clean water, healthy uncontaminated food and a host of other environmental goods that we take for granted. Natural control of pests on farms, the maintenance of biologically active and productive soils, water filtration, the breakdown of wastes and pollutants, provision of shade and shelter, and pollination are some of the services that we all depend on to a lesser or greater extent, but probably give little thought to. Ecosystem services can be damaged through ignorance and mismanagement or simply because there are no markets in which to trade particular services or their products. The concept of ecosystem services is broad and a new field of research endeavour in natural resource management. Research in ecosystem services potentially offers quantitative ecological, economic and social information (the 'triple-bottom line')to aid decision makers and is a useful framework for establishing equitable and transparent resource management policy at state, regional and local scales. There may be trade-offs between ecological and economic goals, and we are attempting to quantify those trade-offs using bio-economic models.