To support policy design on ES, indicators are needed to quantify specific targets on maintaining ES and to monitor progress towards these targets. The European Commission therefore aims to “map and assess the state of ecosystems and their services (…) by 2014” and several attempts to map the supply and demand of ecosystem services have been presented in the literature, ,. To support such policies, there is, consequently, an increasing demand for accurate maps of the supply and demand of ecosystem services. ĭecisions or policies on ES are made based on available information on the status, trends, and spatial distribution of ecosystem service provision.
The European Union (EU) elaborates this target in the European Biodiversity Strategy that aims at maintaining and enhancing ecosystems and their services. Safeguarding these benefits and maintaining, restoring and enhancing ecosystem services (ES) in the future is included as a target in several international policies, such as the 2020 targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The benefits that ecosystems provide to society are increasingly acknowledged. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. All other maps can be obtained from the authors of the paper: The IVM maps and the maps presented in this paper can be obtained from CJE Schulp the JRC maps can be obtained from Joachim Maes.įunding: The authors acknowledge financial support of ERA-net BiodivERsA, with the national funder NWO, part of the 2011 BiodivERsA call within the project CONNECT ( ) (CJES, PV), the European Commission-funded FP7 project OPERAs (PV) and the German BMBF-funded project LEGATO (FKZ 01LL0917F) ( )(BB). The EV maps were obtained from Felix Kienast. The LC maps can be easily reconstructed by reclassifying CORINE land cover ( ) following the tables in (Burkhard et al, 2012). All underlying maps were obtained from, or very closely based on data from 3rd parties under the condition that they should not be passed on to other persons without informing the data provider, and should not be uploaded to public repositories. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The authors confirm that, for approved reasons, some access restrictions apply to the data underlying the findings. Received: MaAccepted: SeptemPublished: October 22, 2014Ĭopyright: © 2014 Schulp et al. PLoS ONE 9(10):Įditor: Gen Hua Yue, Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Singapore The results illustrate the need for better process understanding and data acquisition to advance ecosystem service mapping, modelling and validation.Ĭitation: Schulp CJE, Burkhard B, Maes J, Van Vliet J, Verburg PH (2014) Uncertainties in Ecosystem Service Maps: A Comparison on the European Scale. Policy makers and other users need to be cautious when applying ecosystem service maps for decision-making. Consequently, there are, so far, no accurate measures for ecosystem service map quality. Absence of suitable observed data on ecosystem services provisioning hampers independent validation of the maps. Differences among the maps were caused by differences in indicator definition, level of process understanding, mapping aim, data sources and methodology. Pollination maps had a moderate similarity.
Maps of climate regulation and recreation were reasonably similar while large uncertainties among maps of erosion protection and flood regulation were observed. We made a systematic review and quantitative comparison of ecosystem service maps on the European scale to generate insights in the uncertainty of ecosystem service maps and discuss the possibilities for quantitative validation. However, there is little attention for the accuracy of these maps. To support such policies, ecosystem service maps are made. Safeguarding the benefits that ecosystems provide to society is increasingly included as a target in international policies.
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