Mapping and assessing ecosystem services in the EU - Lessons learned from the ESMERALDA approach of integration

Abstract

The European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 Coordination and Support Action ESMERALDA aimed at developing guidance and a flexible methodology for Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) to support the EU member states in the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy’s Target 2 Action 5. ESMERALDA’s key tasks included network creation, stakeholder engagement, enhancing ecosystem services mapping and assessment methods across various spatial scales and value domains, work in case studies and support of EU member states in MAES implementation. Thus ESMERALDA aimed at integrating various project outcomes around four major strands: i) Networking, ii) Policy, iii) Research and iv) Application. The objective was to provide guidance for integrated ecosystem service mapping and assessment that can be used for sustainable decision-making in policy, business, society, practice and science at EU, national and regional levels. This article presents the overall ESMERALDA approach of integrating the above-mentioned project components and outcomes and provides an overview of how the enhanced methods were applied and how they can be used to support MAES implementation in the EU member states. Experiences with implementing such a large pan-European Coordination and Support Action in the context of EU policy are discussed and recommendations for future actions are given.

Integration of Ecosystem Services in Regional Spatial Plans in Western Switzerland

“…The integration of the ES concept as base for evidence in spatial planning has been increasingly promoted in the literature [16,31], as well as in policy guidelines [56]. Regional planning is particularly relevant for the integration of the ES concept because it aims to reconcile different land uses and weight the various public demand areas which have the potential to provide different ES [33].…”

Urban Ecosystem Services Quantification through Remote Sensing Approach: A Systematic Review

“…One factor that stimulates researchers to use LULC techniques to UES identification and classification purposes is that some authors describe the evaluation of each land use type. For instance, the work of Burkhard et al [7], and the ESMERALDA project [6], is highly mentioned since it comprehends a description of how to evaluate ES from the CORINE land cover classification, which by itself considers 44 different types of land use and cover. From the interpretation of this paper, it is possible to perform the evaluation and modeling of other classifications simpler or that derivate from the CORINE land cover map [9,16,73,81,82,98].…”

“…The ES supply depends on biophysical factors and their modifications over time and space [4][5][6][7]. Since ES are the benefits that humans acquire directly or indirectly through nature [2,8], the urban environments are important study areas for ES supply and demand analysis, once it is where most of the users and beneficiaries of the ES live [7,[9][10][11].…”

“…In this context, the preservation and restoration of natural environments within urban areas is socio-environmentally necessary and, commonly, economically viable [13]. Thus, mapping urban ecosystem services (UES) is described in the literature as an opportunity to monitor natural and anthropized areas that provide ES (its identification and classification), verify how this provision changes according to time and space [5,6,9,14,15], and assess how human-driven changes impacted the urban areas, positively or negatively [7,16,17].…”

Planning for Ecosystem Services in Cities

“…While today several methods for ES mapping and assessment are well-established and have demonstrated their potential to provide useful information to decisionmaking (Burkhard et al 2018), the challenge is on how multiple ES assessments can be integrated to contribute to answer real-world policy questions. On the one hand, decisions usually affect not a single but a bundle of ES (Jopke et al 2015;Spake et al 2017), hence assessments able to account for multiple ES and their multiple values are needed to investigate synergies and trade-offs potentially arising from decisions ).…”