How to Combine Spatial Data for Ecosystem Services Mapping? A GIS-MCDA Approach and Its Application in Tuscany, Italy

Abstract

AbstractAgricultural and forest areas produce sets or bundles of ecosystem services (ESs) key to human well-being and quality of life. The impacts of the processes of urban development and abandonment of cultivated land require policies and governance measures for promoting integrated and mutually beneficial relationships between urban and rural areas, by properly managing the capacity of the latter to produce ESs. For this purpose, an accurate mapping of ESs is essential. In some regions, many spatial data that provide useful indicators for assessing the ESs supply are available, and it is interesting to develop methods to organize and combine them. We propose a method for mapping and bundling the capacity of agricultural and forest areas to supply five ESs, based on the processing of open-source territorial data through GIS and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), and tailored for Tuscany Region (Italy). This method attempt to combine a Land Use and Land Cover map with other data, e.g., on crops, pedology, ecosystems properties and conditions, hydrogeological instability, climate, to obtain a comprehensive ESs assessment. The regional database of crops provides very useful information for ESs assessment but contains inconsistencies which must be corrected for it to be used. We present a case-study that shows the potentiality of the method for advancing research on ESs mapping, even if it needs to be further refined and tested.KeywordsGeographic AHPEcosystem services bundlesTuscany