Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 87

Landscape
services

Supply

demand

beer
brewery

Pest
regulation

Farmer

Water
retention

water
board

Water board

Green
Infrastructure

Water
purification

citizen

Road
manager

Landscape
identity

govern-
ment

Bio-
diversity

Fig. 5.3 Theoretical example of the network of relationships between land owners and land
managers (who can influence the infrastructure of the landscape to produce services) and
beneficiaries of landscape services. The network structure emphasizes the need for cooperation at
the landscape level and for building coalitions of actors at the demand side

providing the same set of ecosystem services could be informative for land owners
to build consortia of service providers. Therefore, there is a need for methods that
not only map localities with a potential to provide a cluster of services, but also
localities where a demand exists. Some recent studies make a step towards pro-
viding such information. Nedkov and Burkhard ( 2011 ) provided information of the
spatial variation in storm water retention capacity. Their method also identified
sites with a flood risk, which could be interpreted as parts of the area with a
demand for a water regulation service upstream. Based on suggestions by Fisher
et al. ( 2009 ), Syrbe and Walz ( 2012 ) proposed to distinguish service providing
areas (ecosystem sites or networks) and service benefiting areas (for example,
rural settlements, urban agglomerations, farms). They provided an example for
flood regulating services in the region of Saxony. Such analysis could be the basis
for a spatially explicit supply and demand analysis. Again, I would like to
emphasize that such endeavours should be able to incorporate social demands from
specific interests groups. An inspiring example of how this could be done was
reported by Pinto-Correiaand and Carvalho-Ribeiro ( 2012 ), who combined user-
based preferences of landscape patterns with land cover indicators, which may
offer a road towards characterizing the land cover pattern that users prefer.
Mapping and assessment approaches have not yet included spatial interde-
pendencies between levels of scale, and the same can be said for approaches that
consider the provisioning of landscape services over long time frames. Consid-
erable progress could be made here if in future science is able to link indicators of
biological community composition to the service level and the reliability of service