Assessing ecosystem services across scales: Potential, supply, and demand of provisioning and cultural services

Abstract

Ecosystems provide us with countless benefits, such as material resources, regulation of environmental processes, and opportunities for recreation. These benefits, known as ecosystem services (ES), support our daily welfare and well-being. ES arise from ecological, sociocultural, and economic interactions, and are influenced by both ecosystems’ capacity to provide services and society’s demand for them. ES are unevenly distributed across space, and their supply and demand change over time. Understanding the patterns of ES provision and consumption facilitates the evaluation of their sustainable use. Therefore, comprehensive assessments of ES production and consumption across spatial and temporal scales are essential to deepen our understanding of the ES concept and its role in natural resource management.

In this thesis, I exemplify the use of the ES framework by assessing the spatial and temporal patterns of ES potential, supply, and demand. Overall, I demonstrate how to select and interpret indicators of ES potential, supply, and demand and address them using spatial and statistical methods. I study the provisioning services of forests (wood resources) and the cultural services provided by urban and peri-urban areas through three separate case studies. Each article examines ES aspects across distinct scales, ranging from continental to local. Two articles are at the European level, one of which also includes a temporal scale, and one is at the urban level.

The results regarding wood ES show that the potential, supply, and demand for wood have all increased across Europe. Compared to demand, Europe has a substantial supply surplus, and the analysis of mismatches between the supply and demand indicates that, on average, Europeans have good spatial accessibility to wood resources. However, the growing trend of exploiting wood ES might affect the state of forest ecosystems and their capacity to provide high-quality ES other than wood. The findings regarding cultural ES suggest that subjective spatial characteristics of green spaces, such as perceived accessibility, play a bigger role in more frequent interactions with nature than the biophysical features of these spaces or the consumption of cultural ES itself. This indicates that urban residents demand better access to green spaces in order to fully enjoy and recognize the capacity of urban ecosystems to deliver high-quality cultural ES within close proximity to their homes.

My thesis exemplifies the application of the ES framework in ES mapping, incorporates ES spatial flow into supply and demand mismatch evaluation, and highlights the importance of subjective human needs and perceptions regarding ES demand as vital parts of the ES framework. The evaluation of the distribution and trends in the potential, supply, and demand of the provisioning ES of wood, alongside the produced maps, supports resource monitoring of European forests. The same applies to the maps of wood ES supply–demand mismatches, which integrate the ES spatial flow through spatial accessibility analysis. These results can inform European forest management strategies, providing spatial insights into wood potential, supply, and demand, and their mismatches. Furthermore, the evaluation of the characteristics of green spaces’ use patterns emphasizes the importance of spatial perceptions in interactions with urban and peri-urban nature. This information can be communicated to decision-makers in the studied cities and used to enhance access to green spaces that provide vital cultural ES for urban populations.