The old good landscape maps: New interpretations enabling ecosystem services assessment of conservation potential at a national scale

Abstract

The ecosystem services (ES) approach has been widely accepted in environmental policies and management as an adequate platform that can serve as a link between nature and society. Many ES are influenced by the landscape structure. Thus, national-scale landscape mapping can potentially contribute to nature conservation management. However, there are no attempts to directly link the ES assessment with the landscape units at a national level. In this paper, we propose an approach for the transformation of paper copy information from old landscape maps to enable the assessment of ES conservation potential at the national landscape scale. The conceptual scheme of the approach contains three main elements: (i) data acquisition; (ii) landscape and ES assessment data processing; and (iii) mapping of ES potential at a landscape level. The results reveal the landscape heterogeneity based on landscape classification and mapping at a national level and the ES conservation potential based on the analyses of the Natural Heritage (NH) in the country to provide ES. The assessment of ES conservation potential using the national scale landscape mapping allows us to analyze the spatial relationships between the landscapes with high conservation value and the existing nature protection network. The conceptual scheme of the study demonstrates how the results of the ES potential provided by the NH at a national level can be combined with the landscape units from the traditional landscape classification schemes to produce various spatial and statistical metrics that reveal how the national system of protected areas coincides with the areas of high ES conservation value.