In June, 2009 President Obama established an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, led by the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Among other things, the Task Force will recommend a framework for effective coastal and marine spatial planning. In what may be the first mention of “ecological services” by a US President, Obama wrote, “The oceans, our coasts, and the Great Lakes provide jobs, food, energy resources, ecological services, recreation, and tourism opportunities. . .” Ensuring the sustainability of the delivery of a broad suite of ecosystem services is central to the vision of ecosystem-based management (EBM) of coastal and marine systems. This symposium will present advances in the modeling and mapping of marine ecosystem services and the trade-offs between them and will then focus on the ways in which these advances are being incorporated into decision-making, such as the Ocean Policy Task Force. The objectives of the proposed symposium are to a) share recent advances in modeling and mapping ecosystem services and b) to connect those advances to decision-making on the ground and in the water. The scientific community has made great progress toward conceptualizing, articulating, modeling, mapping, and raising the awareness of ecosystem services. It is clear that assessments of ecosystem services require estimates of changes in ecosystem structure and function and resultant changes in the flows of services. Explorations of ecosystem services provided by marine systems have focused on a variety of services including shoreline protection, fisheries, and aquaculture. Modeling efforts and the creation of ecosystem-service assessment tools are helping this field transition from theory to practice. Some examples include the MIMES project and the Natural Capital Project’s Marine Initiative. This symposium will be of broad interest to the membership of ESA; there is growing interest ecological interest in the framework of ecosystem services, marine and coastal services have clear connections to activities on land, and the connection between the science and policy arenas is timely and clear. We propose a three-part symposium: 1) Moving from theory to practice: advances in the modeling and mapping of marine ecosystem services and the trade-offs between them (6 talks), 2) Where the rubber meets the road: Incorporating ecosystem service modeling and mapping into decision-making (3 talks), and 3) A synthetic discussion of the tools, approaches, decision-making contexts, and the path forward to realized ecosystem based management of marine and coastal systems.