Indicators of ecosystem service potential at European scales: Mapping marginal changes and trade-offs

Abstract This study develops an approach to mapping indicators of the potential of ecosystems to supply ecosystem services, and the impact of changes in land cover and use upon them. The study focuses on the EU-25 plus Switzerland and Norway, and develops the methodology proposed by Kienast et al. (2009) , which uses expert-and literature-driven modelling methods. The methods are explored in relation to mapping and assessing four of the ecosystem services: “Crop-based production”; “Wildlife products”; “Habitat diversity”; and “Recreation”. The potential to deliver services is assumed to be influenced by (a) land-use, (b) net primary production, and (c) bioclimatic and landscape properties such as mountainous terrain, adjacency to coastal and wetland ecosystems, as well as adjacency to landscape and nature protection zones. The novel aspect of this work is an analysis of whether the historical and the projected land use changes for the periods 1990–2000, 2000–2006, and 2000–2030 are likely to be supportive or degenerative in the capacity of ecosystems to deliver ecosystem services; we refer to these as ‘marginal’ or incremental changes. The latter are assessed by using land account data for 1990–2000 and 2000–2006 (LEAC, EEA, 2006 ) and EURURALIS 2.0 land use scenarios for 2000–2030. The results are reported at three spatial reporting units, i.e. (1) the NUTS-X regions, (2) the bioclimatic regions, and (3) the dominant landscape types. All mapped output has been compared with independently generated continent-wide assessments (maps of ecosystem services or environmental parameters/indicators), which revealed that the straightforward binary links work satisfactorily and generate plausible geographical patterns. This conclusion mainly holds for provisioning services. At the continental scale, the selected input parameters are thus valid proxies which can be used to assess the medium-term potential of landscapes to provide ecosystem services. For a subset of NUTS-x regions for which change trajectories for 1990–2000, 2000–2006 and 2000–2030 are available, trade-offs between the four services have been analyzed using cluster analyses. The latter allowed us to simultaneously analyze the state of the four services in year 2000 and the individual trajectories of each service over three time periods. As a result we obtained seven regions with distinct trade-off patterns. To our knowledge this is one of the first continental-wide analyses where land use trajectories are taken into account to construct an indicator to estimate the balance between a set or bundle of ecosystem services. The relationship between the outputs of this work and the development of rapid assessment and accounting frameworks is discussed.