The five Catchment Partnerships in the Mersey Basin are adopting an ecosystem services approach to their catchment management planning activities. During this participatory process, stakeholders and technical specialists work with a broker/facilitator to identify areas within their catchment which play, or have the potential to play, a particularly important role in the delivery of a range of benefits (ecosystem services) to society. To ensure that the resulting synthesis is robust, all of the data and evidence relating to each ecosystem service (and the environmental infrastructure that provides it) is collated and scrutinised by the stakeholders during the discussions. Once the evidence has been evaluated, the partnership then works to develop a series of conceptual models or ‘rules’ which can be used to define areas of the catchment most likely to play a critical role in the provision of the different ecosystem services
