Water-Related Ecosystem Services – The Case Study of Regulating Ecosystem Services in the Kielstau Basin, Germany

Abstract

For planning and obtaining a sustainable environmental management of river basins, stakeholder information and participation is an important procedure for the decision-making process. Stakeholders need suitable information on spatio-temporal variations in ecosystem services which can be derived by different quantification methods such as modelling. This study shows an approach to combine ecohydrological modelling results with valuation methods for assessing ecosystem services. The rural lowland Kielstau river basin in Northern Germany serves as the study area. Based on the results of the ecohydrological model SWAT, simulated variables were used as indicators for regulating services and were directly translated into a 0–5 valuation scale for each different land use/land cover classes. One detailed example is given by providing and analysing the SWAT variable ‘sediment yield’ as an indicator for the regulating ecosystem service ‘erosion regulation’. The SWAT model results reveal the temporal changes in erosion regulation due to crop rotation and different precipitation patterns over the years, which includes important information in the assessment of ecosystem services and the formulation of management actions.