Ecosystem Services: The Landscape-Ecological Base and Examples

László Miklós,Ingrid Belčáková,Monika Offertálerová,Viktória Miklósová,Anna Špinerová

doi:10.3390/su122310167

Abstract

The major problems of our environment have become mainstream themes in everyday life of the society, with corresponding moral, political, and financial consequences. The concept of ecosystem services (ESS) surely belongs to such mainstream popular topics regarded also by EU environmental strategies. Moreover, the right assessment and utilisation of ESS are without any doubt one of the precondition of sustainable development. In general, we can say that this concept has important influence on the spheres of economics and politics; these formulate demands towards the science, and consecutively, the science efforts to answer these demands. The paper is aimed at two goals: the first one is to zoom in on the landscape-ecological concept of ESS by the geosystem approach, for the correct understanding of the basic terms, such as as ecosystem, geosystem, landscape, utility values, and services. The second goal is to present examples of several types of ESS evaluation in different study areas using the integrated landscape-ecological (geosystem) approach. The methods used are based on the geosystem approach to the landscape; the process is based on the methods of landscape ecological planning. The results are the assessment of 4 types of ecosystem services on study areas.

Highlights

IntroductionAccording to experiences based on our researches in this field, we fully agree with the statement that “Despite, or perhaps because of the wide distribution and almost inflationary use of the ES term there is no question that a clear and uncontroversial, universally accepted definition does not exist” [1]
Both the theory and the practice of landscape sciences decisively influenced several essential concepts and themes of sustainable development, such as the environmental care, the management of natural resources, the nature conservation, the landscape planning, the integrated watershed management as well as the concept of ecosystem services.According to experiences based on our researches in this field, we fully agree with the statement that “Despite, or perhaps because of the wide distribution and almost inflationary use of the ES term there is no question that a clear and uncontroversial, universally accepted definition does not exist” [1]
The object of assessment: landscape-ecological complexes (LEC) (ABC {xi}, current landscape structure (CLS) {yi}) The formal functionality: ACP = f(ABC {xi}, CLS {yi}) The basic presumption for ecosystem services (ESS) ACP was: the more suitable the georelief and soil-ecological conditions in LECs for agricultural crops production are, the higher is the value of ESS ACP

Summary

Introduction

According to experiences based on our researches in this field, we fully agree with the statement that “Despite, or perhaps because of the wide distribution and almost inflationary use of the ES term there is no question that a clear and uncontroversial, universally accepted definition does not exist” [1]. The following subsections focuses on basic theoretical problems of the concept of ecosystem services. The Theoretical Questions of ESS (a) The object of ESS—the ecosystem. According to the base definition given by [2], as well as by all later scientific definitions, the ecosystem is the system of the abiotic surroundings (physiotop) and the biocenosis. In a number of present studies—up to the probably most broadly scoped international project on ESS, which included 27 case studies [3,4]—the objects of the ESS are in most of cases not ecosystems, but highly simplified elements of land cover or the simplified types of vegetation formations [5]

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Conclusion