The reconciliation of biodiversity conservation, ecosystem service provision and agricultural production
in tropical landscapes requires recognition of the trade-offs between competing land-uses. It is especially
relevant for conservation planning to assess whether the economic value of ecosystem services is spatially
congruent with biodiversity. Previous analyses have largely focused on ecosystem service provision
or assumed homogeneous economic values across land uses within biomes. We relax this assumption by
carrying out a spatially explicit meta-analysis based on 30 studies of ecosystem service values in tropical
forests from The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) database, while controlling for economic,
environmental and methodological variables. Our results demonstrate a lack of spatial congruence
between the economic value of ecosystem services and biodiversity in tropical forests. Instead, we find
that economic value presents a nonlinear inverted-U relationship with site accessibility and economic
activity, highlighting the importance of matching supply and demand between each ecosystem service
and its beneficiaries for economic values to be realized. The implications are that conservation policies
focusing solely on the economic value of ecosystem services will fail to protect biodiversity in remote
and less disturbed regions.