Here, we argue that Vegetation-regulated Moisture Recycling (VMR) is a critical ecosystem service that must be quantified and evaluated for its relative importance around the planet. We define VMR as the evaporated water that returns as precipitation downwind that is attributable to vegetation on land. VMR can thus be estimated as the amount of water that is regulated by current (i. e. present-day) vegetation relative to desert vegetation, in terms of both (a) the vegetation-regulated evaporation that enters the atmosphere, and (b) the fraction of precipitation falling downwind that can be attributed to upwind vegetation.We present a method for quantifying where VMR provides a significant ecosystem service. We use this method in an idealised comparison of a global simulation of current vegetation with a global simulation where all terrestrial surfaces are converted to desert vegetation. These global simulations involve both a land-surface hydrology model that simulates evaporation (Wang-Erlandsson, et al., 2014), and an atmospheric moisture budget model that tracks where moisture enters the atmosphere as evaporation, where it flows around the planet, and where it eventually falls out as precipitation (van der Ent, et al., 2014). Our results depict the importance of VMR in terms of the generation of the ecosystem service (i. e. VMR sources), and in terms of the potential beneficiaries of the ecosystem service (i. e.VMR sinks). Furthermore, we explore how our method could be used in a more practical case study, and synthesise our findings in a generalised framework.The novelty of our work is not in the moisture recycling analysis, nor in the idealised global simulation of current vegetation versus desert vegetation. Rather, the novelty is (a) our integration of moisture recycling and VMR into a quantified ecosystem services approach, and (b) the generalization of these findings into a framework that can be broadly applied using different modeling setups or different sources of data.