Indigenous vegetation provides a range of services of varying values to humanity. These are associated with the normal

functioning of components in integrated ecological systems. The type and level of service inevitably varies among ecosystems but New Zealand’s indigenous grasslands can contribute multiple services depending on grassland type and their degree of intactness. As the human population and associated land-use pressures increase in New Zealand, many ecosystem services provided by indigenous ecosystems are reduced and threatened.

Understanding this complex relationship in a particular ecosystem or related ecosystems is most important and should be an integral component of environmental planning.The normal functioning of most ecosystems provides many

tangible benefi ts to human well-being that are usually taken for granted by the general public unless they become obvious by a sudden disruption or threatened failure. Most ecosystem services cannot be privately owned, so are appropriately treated as ‘public good’, which adds to their risk of being ignored or inadvertently threatened. In addition, disturbing an ecosystem in a particular location often causes effects elsewhere.

In this book chapter we address some of these categories and outline the role of tussock grasslands in the major types of New Zealand’s indigenous grasslands.To set the scene, some historical aspects of the origins, development, management and research in New Zealand’s indigenous grasslands are described, and changes in land tenure are outlined to provide a background against which the ecosystem services that grasslands have to offer can be better understood. The ecosystem services that different grassland types are able to provide are described according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment categories, especially those of provisioning (biodiversity values); regulating (water production, pollination, biological control); cultural (educational, scientifi c, recreational and tourism values); and supporting (soil conservation values, carbon storage and sequestration). The threats to these services are then described with emphasis on land use (grazing and intensifi cation, mining), invasive weeds and invertebrates, and climate change. We conclude by pointing out that indigenous grassland ecosystems deliver a wide range of important ecosystem services that provide many tangible benefi ts to human well-being, which are best protected in public ownership and managed as a critically important public-good resource