The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment produced a compelling synthesis of the global value of ecosystem services to human well-being. While the MEA was a critical, initial step to demonstrate the potential for assessing global trends in ecosystem services, the MEA did not attempt to down-scale such assessments to regional or even national scales of analysis, nor to create methods and tools to support decision-makers at any level of governance, industry, or citizen action. A new research perspective focusing on ecosystem services is needed in which we define ecosystem services as the products of ecological functions or processes that directly or indirectly contribute to human well-being, or have the potential to do so in the future. Building upon indicators linking ecosystem services to human and community health, both ecosystem and placed based information could be used to develop one or more measures of human well-being. Such measure(s) would expand the interpretation of coastal ecosystem service indicators into an overall quality of life measurement for environmental decision support. For this session, we solicit research, theoretical, and case-study papers that contribute to a broader understanding of how the condition or “health” of coastal ecosystems affects ecological processes and services that, in turn, directly or indirectly affect human health and well being and which might help lead to development of measures of human well being.