Abstract
The unique Hyrcanian (Caspian) forests of northern Iran provide vital ecosystem services for local and global communities. We assess the status and trends of key ecosystem services in this region where native forest conversion has accelerated to make way for housing and farm development. This is a mountainous forested area that is valuable for both conservation and multiple human uses including recreation and farming. It contains globally significant natural habitats for in situ conservation of biological diversity. A rapid, qualitative, and participatory approach was used including interviews with local households and experts in combination with assessment of land use/cover remote sensing data to identify and map priority ecosystem services in the Geographic Information System (GIS). Based on the interests of the beneficiaries, eight priority services (food production, water supply, raw materials, soil conservation, water regulation, climate regulation, biodiversity, and recreation) were identified and mapped. The results indicate the current typical spatial distribution of the provided services based on structural characteristics of the study landscape and their changing trends through a comparison of past, present and future land use, and land cover. Although food production and recreation have greatly increased in recent decades, the other services, in particular timber production, biodiversity, and water purification and supply are being gradually lost. The results of this study and of others elsewhere should raise awareness of ecosystem service status and trends and the value of examining these since they provide much of the information to inform natural resources policy and decision making. The declines in supply of key ecosystem services both within and outside the protected area are creating conflicts within communities as well as impacting on the integrity of the area and careful planning and conservation is required to provide win-win opportunities.
Highlights
Forested ecosystems provide a wide range of benefits to people and the vulnerability of these benefits to anthropogenic change has become the focus of intense research and policy interest [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].The development of new approaches to assess ecosystem services (ES) has led to different definitions of these services by various authors [8,9,10,11,12,13]
Our research demonstrates how descriptive input data collected via consensus-based participatory processes involving both experts and local people can be used in conjunction with satellite imagery and Geographic Information System (GIS) data in ES assessment, in data-poor areas typically found in developing countries
We applied a rapid, qualitative method previously used by other authors, incorporating several modifications, to a unique forested landscape where no ES assessment had been performed before
Summary
Forested ecosystems provide a wide range of benefits to people and the vulnerability of these benefits to anthropogenic change has become the focus of intense research and policy interest [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].The development of new approaches to assess ecosystem services (ES) has led to different definitions of these services by various authors [8,9,10,11,12,13]. The most common and widely accepted definition provided by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) [4], defines ES as “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems” These benefits include provisioning, regulating, and cultural services that directly affect people and the supporting services needed to maintain other services. Application of this approach may provide both the protection of ES and economic development and suggest indicators and metrics which can be used for effective policy design and increased likelihood of win–win outcomes [14,15,16]. Many forested landscapes are changing rapidly in response to changes in key social and ecological drivers such as land use change and global warming [22,23,24]
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