This Special Issue features research that was presented during two key international events. The first event was a conference by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), held in Tartu (Estonia) in 2015, with the theme 'Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Forested Landscapes'. The second event was a symposium organized during the Ecosummit in Montpellier (France) in 2016. The symposium was a joint effort from the EU-funded OpenNESS project, IALE and IUFRO communities, under the theme 'Scenarios and models of key indirect and direct drivers in relation to nature's benefits to people'. The guest editors, Sandra Luque, Christine Fürst and Davide Geneletti, are delighted to share twelve exciting papers with you, that have been published in a Special Issue on Ecosystem Services Nexus Thinking. 'Nexus thinking' is understood as the ability to hold key developmental variables together, when searching for solutions at different levels within a holistic landscape approach. The central question that features prominently in this Special Issue is: How can we make choices about land use to address multifunctional landscape planning needs? Papers in this Special Issue either deal with land-use planning and land management on a landscape scale, or describe cases in which incorporating the ecosystem services concept has supported the implementation of nexus thinking in planning and decision making.