Landscapes' Capacities to Provide Ecosystem Services - a Concept for Land-Cover Based Assessments

By Benjamin Burkhard, F. Kroll, Felix Müller, Wilhelm Windhorst. 2009

777 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Landscapes differ in their capacities to provide ecosystem goods and services, which are the benefits humans obtain from nature. Structures and functions of ecosystems needed to sustain the provision of ecosystem services are altered by various human activities. In this paper, a concept for the assessment of multiple ecosystem services is proposed as a basis for discussion and further development of a respective evaluation instrument. Using quantitative and qualitative assessment data in combination with land cover and land use information originated from remote sensing and GIS, impacts of human activities can be evaluated. The results reveal typical patterns of different ecosystems‘ capacities to provide ecosystem services. The proposed approach thus delivers useful integrative information for environmental management and landscape planning, aiming at a sustainable use of services provided by nature. The research concept and methodological framework presented here for discussion have initially been applied in different case studies and shall be developed further to provide a useful tool for the quantification and spatial modelling of multiple ecosystem services in different landscapes. An exemplary application of the approach dealing with food provision in the Halle-Leipzig region in Germany is presented. It shows typical patterns of ecosystem service distribution around urban areas. As the approach is new and still rather general, there is great potential for improvement, especially with regard to a data-based quantification of the numerous hypotheses, which were formulated as base for the assessment. Moreover, the integration of more detailed landscape information on different scales will be needed in future in order to take the heterogeneous distribution of landscape properties and values into account. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to foster critical discussions on the methodological development presented here.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/386050374fd55580f1b662f322c92240e677032f

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Soil “Ecosystem” Services and Natural Capital: Critical Appraisal of Research on Uncertain Ground (2016, background): “…the ESF apprehends nature a single ecosystem (e.g., wetland, tundra, forest, estuary) at a time, or as a collection or mosaic of juxtaposed ecosystems, as is also the case in many landscape management practices (Burkhard et al., 2009; Willemen et al., 2012; van Wensem, 2013; Hodder et al., 2014).”
A quantitative review of relationships between ecosystem services (2014, background): “Land systems thus have a potential to provide multiple ecosystem services (ES) (Burkhard et al., 2009; Tallis and Polasky, 2009; Mastrangelo et al., 2014; Schindler et al., 2014).”
Sustainability indicators for improved assessment of the effects of agricultural policy across the EU: Is FADN the answer? (2018, background): “Secondly, although indicators of sustainability can be developed at various levels including regional and national levels, the farm-level approach increases the spatial accuracy of indicators, which is highlighted as a main challenge (Burkhard et al., 2009).”
On the relation between ecosystem services, intrinsic value, existence value and economic valuation (2013, background): “Raymond et al. (2009) add intrinsic value under cultural ecosystem services in their assessment of community values and threats (see also Burkhard et al., 2009; Chan et al., 2012), while according to Reyers et al. (2012: 504) “it appears that it is often the complexity of intrinsic and instrumental…”
European agricultural landscapes, common agricultural policy and ecosystem services: a review (2013, methodology): “A methodological focus on ecosystem functions or biodiversity (Burkhard et al. 2010; Maes et al. 2012) may disregard the possibilities for valorization given the lack of knowledge about the societal demand for the delivered services in the region.”
Assessing water ecosystem services for water resource management (2016, background): “Several approaches to assess and map ecosystem services are available in the literature, from land cover maps combined with scoring factors (Burkhard et al., 2009) to specific ecosystem service models based on ecological production functions (Sharp et al., 2015), and decision support tools (Bagstad…”
‘The Matrix Reloaded': A review of expert knowledge use for mapping ecosystem services (2015, methodology): “A first common critique on the matrix model and its resulting maps suggest that its capacity to adequately cover spatial (and temporal) variability is too restricted (e.g., Burkhard et al., 2009, 2014).”
A Quantitative Review of Urban Ecosystem Service Assessments: Concepts, Models, and Implementation (2014, methodology): “Bio-physical, GIS-based, statistical, qualitative, causal loop, look-up table, willingness-to-pay, survey, interview, conjoint analysis, prize, trading, REDD, risk assessment, empirical, other, not applicable Are trade-offs considered?”
A multi-criteria approach for an integrated land-cover-based assessment of ecosystem services provision to support landscape planning (2012, methodology): “In a subsequent step we revised other investigations on ecosysem services and the related indicators (e.g. Costanza et al., 1997; A, 2005; Burkhard et al., 2009).”
Ecosystem service potentials, flows and demands-concepts for spatial localisation, indication and quantification (2014, methodology): “Since the first publication of the ecosystem service ‘matrix’, which links land cover types to ecosystem service supply capacities (Burkhard et al. 2009 in this journal), the method has successfully been applied to quantify and map ecosystem services in several case studies (e.g. Kandziora et al.…”
Mapping ecosystem service supply, demand and budgets (2012, methodology): “The applied method of ecosystem service supply mapping has been presented before in Burkhard et al. (2009). The ecosystem service demand mapping and the final ecosystem service budgeting are added as new components to ecosystem service mapping approaches.”
Ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies misunderstood without landscape history (2016, background): “Distinguishing between ES capacity, flows, demand, and preferences is critical for understanding their temporal dynamics (Burkhard et al. 2009, 2012, Villamagna et al. 2013, Mouchet et al. 2014, Beier et al. 2015).”