Aligning nature protection with human well-being for the UN Sustainable Development Goals implies that conservation monitoring should indicate the sustainability of ecosystem services (ES). Here we test the value of the ES cascade framework using national, multi-decadal data for an iconic freshwater fish, the Atlantic salmon Salmo salar. For the first time, we assemble all long-term monitoring data for England and Wales along the ES cascade for this species from resource to benefit: juvenile density to measure the biological resource, returning adult numbers to measure potential ES use, and rod catches and angling effort as measures of actual ES use. We aimed to understand how the ES cascade framework reconciled conservation with ES sustainability targets.

Only some linkages along the ES cascade could be evidenced: in catchments where juveniles declined, rod catches also generally decreased, but angling effort declined everywhere irrespective of the biological resource trends. We suggest that i) programmes focused on juvenile monitoring provide an early-warning system for ES provision as well as nature conservation, ii) the ES cascade framework can reconcile nature conservation and ES sustainability if monitoring efforts link biological resources fully to the ES, and ES monitoring explicitly relates biological resources to human use.

使自然保护与人类福祉相适应，以实现联合国可持续发展目标，这意味着保护监测应表明生态系统服务的可持续性。在这里，我们使用国家多年代数据对标志性淡水鱼大西洋鲑Salmo salar进行ES级联框架的价值测试。我们首次沿该ES级联收集了英格兰和威尔士沿该ES级的所有长期监测数据，从资源到受益：幼年密度以测量生物资源，返回成年号以测量潜在的ES使用，以及钓竿捕获和捕获钓鱼的努力作为实际ES使用的量度。我们旨在了解ES级联框架如何将保护与ES可持续性目标协调一致。

仅能证明沿ES级联的某些联系：在幼鱼减少的集水区，钓竿的渔获量总体上也减少了，但是无论生物资源趋势如何，各地的垂钓努力都减少了。我们建议i）专注于青少年监测的计划为ES的提供和自然保护提供了一个预警系统，ii）ES的级联框架可以协调自然保护​​和ES的可持续性，前提是监测工作将生物资源与ES完全结合在一起；以及ES监测明确将生物资源与人类使用联系起来。