Ecosystem degradation represents one of today’s major global challenges, threatening human well-being and livelihoods worldwide. To reverse continuing degradation, we need to understand its socio-economic consequences so that these can be incorporated into ecosystem management decisions. This requires links to be made between our understanding of how ecosystems function and change, with socially meaningful representations of those changes. While increasing attempts are being made at such integration, the interface or translation between those two strands remains largely undiscussed. This carries the risk that key aspects of the socio-ecological interactions become ‘lost in translation’. In this paper, we document and discuss how models of ecosystem change may be combined with socially meaningful outcomes exposing and discussing the translation process itself (i.e. the ‘translation key’). For this, we use an exemplar based on peatland condition. We employ a process-based model, DigiBog, to simulate the effects of land use on blanket peatlands, which we relate to estimates of changes to the public’s well-being derived from peatland degradation and restoration, obtained as monetary values from a choice experiment survey in Scotland (UK). By quantifying linkages between environmental conditions and social values, we make the translation between these system components transparent and allow value estimates to be recalculated under different ecological scenarios, or as new evidence emerges. This enhances the replicability of the research and can better inform decision-making. By using peatlands as the exemplar ecosystem, this paper also contributes to a limited body of evidence on the socio-economic impacts of changes to the most space-effective carbon store in the terrestrial biosphere.

生态系统退化是当今主要的全球挑战之一，威胁着全世界人类的福祉和生计。为了扭转持续的退化，我们需要了解其社会经济后果，以便将这些后果纳入生态系统管理决策。这需要在我们对生态系统如何运作和变化的理解与这些变化的社会意义表征之间建立联系。尽管正在对这种整合进行越来越多的尝试，但这两条链之间的接口或转换在很大程度上仍未得到讨论。这带来了社会生态相互作用的关键方面“在翻译中迷失”的风险。在本文中，我们记录并讨论了生态系统变化模型如何与具有社会意义的结果相结合，从而揭示和讨论翻译过程本身（即“翻译密钥”）。为此，我们使用基于泥炭地条件的示例。我们采用基于过程的模型 DigiBog 来模拟土地利用对泥炭地的影响，我们将其与泥炭地退化和恢复导致的公众福祉变化的估计相关，从选择实验调查中作为货币价值获得在苏格兰（英国）。通过量化环境条件和社会价值之间的联系，我们使这些系统组件之间的转换变得透明，并允许在不同的生态情景下或新证据出现时重新计算价值估计。这增强了研究的可复制性，并可以更好地为决策​​提供信息。通过使用泥炭地作为示范生态系统，本文还提供了有限的证据，证明陆地生物圈中最具空间效率的碳储存变化对社会经济的影响。