A multi-criteria approach for an integrated land-cover-based assessment of ecosystem services provision to support landscape planning

The article presents a multicriteria assessment framework for the qualitative estimation of regional potentials to provide ecosystem services as a prerequisite to support regional development planning. We applied this approach to a model region in Saxony, Eastern Germany. For the estimation of the potentials of the model region to provide ecosystem services, we used a modified approach compared to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). We then employed a benefit transfer and a purely expert driven approach to assess contribution of the land cover classes in our model region to the provision of ecosystern services. In a subsequent step, the services in our set were combined to ecosystem services groups that were designed together with regional actors, while considering their ideas, concerns and experiences in regional decision making. The latter was analyzed in a weighting experiment, in which different weighting approaches were tested. Based upon this, we analyzed the performance of the model region to provide ecosystem services and generated ecosystem services distribution maps. We could show that the different data gathering methods benefit transfer and expert-based assessment have a considerable impact on the evaluation outcomes. The results of our study show that the combination of selected services and land cover data can contribute to regional planning by communicating the effect of land cover change on ecosystem services groups, especially when applied as an evaluation basis in the tool Pimp Your Landscape (PYL). The approach supports also the assessment of the performance of a region to provide ecosystem services and the comparison of regions towards this aspect. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our approach that are related to coarse land cover data, lacking knowledge on the provision of ecosystem services at a landscape scale, and the difficulty to make relevant the ecosystem services concept in regional planning processes. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.