Washington journalist Paul Mallon had it right ? there is no such thing as a free lunch. Goods and services ? food, timber, clean air, clean water, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, and more?produced by North America's healthy landscapes have long been viewed as infinite resources. Many of these ecosystem services, with the notable exception of commodities like food and timber, have largely existed outside the market-driven system on which society depends to value and pay for its raw materials and products.

The growing field of ecosystem services (ES) provides a framework for conservationists to place the wants and needs of humans in proper perspective, i.e., dependent on the functionality of intact ecosystems. Thus, an ES perspective presents a potential paradigm shift in North American natural resource conservation. Rather than depending entirely on the ever-shrinking financial foundation of federal appropriations and select demographic groups (e.g., hunters) to fund conservation, an ES funding approach holds that the key beneficiaries of natural resources should foot the bill to ensure critical ES sustainability.

The application of ES markets to natural resource conservation projects has been shown to generate more than four times the amount of funding of many typical conservation projects, to secure long-term ecological and social benefits in the process. Thus, incorporating ES markets into working landscapes can provide the infrastructure for sustainable business models that integrate a wide variety of financial tools and sponsors and achieve critical conservation objectives.

"Ecosystem Service Markets: Funding Tools for Conservation" is the topic of Special Session 1 at the 75^th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference. Concurrent with three other special sessions, it will be held from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, Wednesday, March 24, 2010, at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.?The session will provide an overview of the ES framework and its growing importance to today's management approaches for wildlife and other natural resources. Presenters will describe established and emerging ES markets and the capacity of these markets, if designed correctly, to increase and diversify funding sources, to expand the role of the private sector in conservation, and to realize more beneficial outcomes from public and private land management programs.

The diverse, numerous and complex challenges facing habitat conservation today call for fresh, innovative thinking and a renewed commitment to partnerships and collaboration. Special Session 1, co-chaired by Joshua Goldstein of Colorado State University and Matt Dunfee of the Wildlife Management Institute, will present tools and tips from ES programs in North America that have successfully unlocked new opportunities for conservation through synergistic coalitions of federal and state agencies, businesses, research scientists and environmental groups. In addition, the presenters will address factors that have given rise to ES markets, such as the increasing need for environmental quality improvements in the face of new laws and regulations and the rising demand for innovative solutions to chronic local, regional and global environmental concerns.