Ecosystem services are being championed as a new strategy for conservation, under the hypothesis that they will broaden and increase support for biodiversity protection. Where traditional approaches have focused on setting aside land and purchasing property rights, ecosystem services approaches have the potential to broaden conservation mechanisms especially by incorporating production activities. This is particularly important given the rapid expansion of human population and human modification of ecosystems for production, especially agricultural production. Using interview-based field research on 34 ecosystem service projects and 26 traditional biodiversity projects from the Western Hemisphere we analyze whether ecosystem service approaches can lead to the creation of diverse, interdisciplinary, multi-sector partnerships targeting a wide variety of biological systems using a diversity of strategies.  Specifically, we test the ability of such approaches to target new landscapes, diversify conservation tools used, and engage new stakeholders as compared to traditional biodiversity approaches. 
Results/Conclusions We show that ecosystem service projects attract on average more than four times as much funding through corporate sponsors and use a wider variety of finance tools than biodiversity projects.  Ecosystem service projects are also more likely to encompass working landscapes. Interestingly, many of the ecosystem service projects appeared to successfully bring together interdisciplinary partnerships including stakeholders ranging from indigenous, subsistence farmers to large international for-profit organizations. Despite previous concern, we show that not only do ecosystem service projects expand opportunities for conservation, but they are no less likely than biodiversity projects to include or create protected areas. However, we also found that monitoring of conservation outcomes in both cases is so infrequent that it is impossible to assess the effectiveness of either traditional biodiversity or ecosystem service projects.