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Abstract The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has called for assessments explicitly accounting for interregional flows of ecosystem services (ESs) across geographic scales. An important type of interregional ES flow is generated by the long‐distance movements of migratory species. Many migratory species provide important benefits to people, and due to migration dynamics, ESs provided in one location may be affected by habitat conservation, or lack thereof, in other locations. The state of the science on interregional flows of ESs from migratory species, however, is nascent and lacks structure needed to consistently characterize flows. We developed a 4‐tiered system for categorizing assessments and the conclusions they can support based on 4 levels of ecological and socioeconomic information, ranging from incomplete to high, and how they are combined. The 4 tiers of assessment are based on differing levels of detail in the estimation of system‐level ecological and socioeconomic information on a species and the services it provides: telecoupled ESs, qualitative flows, quantitative static flows, and quantitative dynamic flows. Recent assessment studies largely fall within the first tier, which does not quantify flows. Socioeconomic and ecological information are needed to achieve each tier. Our framework can be used to identify and classify a range of methods, with varying time and data requirements, that can be used to maximize the information content and relevance of ES assessments for migratory species based on available resources. 

Since the 1980s, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has transformed from an agency predominantly focused on timber production to one focused on recreation and ecosystem management. This shift is particularly remarkable because it occurred without major substantive national forest policy changes. During this period, many national forests changed their forest planning processes in ways that provided greater opportunity for public input into forest plans, and in 2012 the USFS issued new planning rules that institutionalized these practices. In this study, we ask: how has the planning process changed over time, and how have these changes shaped forest plan outcomes? To answer these questions, we conduct a comparative case study of two national forests—the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit and the Inyo National Forest—that produced forest plans in the 1980s and again in the 2010s. We use the Network of Action Situations (NAS) approach to compare planning processes over time and across forests. We find that in addition to the changes mandated by the 2012 rules, both forests developed a series of forums to engage the public in plan development and review, and that increased stakeholder engagement has helped shape forest priorities. These findings suggest that greater involvement by regional stakeholders could pressure the USFS to adopt more regional approaches for addressing challenges like climate change and wildfire risk.