Okay, I basically understand what emergy (embodied energy) is – the amount of energy incorporated (as opposed to lost to heat) in something useful, like an organism or a whole ecosystem. I am partial to the concept just from secondhand exposure to Howard T. Odum at the University of Florida. I never studied with him, but I knew some of his students and absorbed a little bit of his ideas through osmosis, and then I went back and did some reading later when I realized what I had missed. This paper is co-authored by Mark T. Brown, Odum’s long time collaborator who is still at UF pumping out studies on the subject.

The paper is interesting just for its literature review of other studies of ecosystem services and ecosystem function. The methods section has a nice run down of available spatial layers on energy, biomass, and ecosystems. The conclusion is that ecosystem functions are valuable, we have destroyed a lot of them, we are continuing to destroy them, and we may not be able to survive without them.