Landscape Structure and Ecosystem Services of Etropole Municipality - Sustainable Development in Mountain Regions: Southeastern Europe - page 88

of the municipality is characterized with unfavourable age structure and negative
growth rate. The share of the industrial enterprises in the economic sector in 2003 is
73% and they ensure 57.3% of the workplaces in the municipality. The agriculture
is dominated by stock breeding. According to data of the municipality, the wood
output within its boundaries has been drastically increased in the course of the last
7-8 years - from 12,000 to 35,000 m 3 annually. The plan for municipal progress till
2013 envisages development of tourism on the basis of the nine protected territories
and the remarkable cultural heritage.
8.3 Materials and Methods
The mountain landscapes are characterized by higher lever of heterogeneity due to
the great variety of geographical conditions. The change of landscape units in the
mountains takes place within few kilometres while in the plains the corresponding
change can be detected after hundreds and thousands of kilometres. This necessi-
tates the implementation of a specific approach, which takes into account the third
dimension of the landscape - the elevation. To investigate the landscape hetero-
geneity, methods by which spatial patterning can be described and quantified are
necessary. That is why we develop an approach using regression dependencies and
GIS tools for spatial analyses to model the spatial pattern and produce landscape
maps for the mountain areas. It is based on a regression model of interpolation using
correlation dependencies between hydro-climatic indices and the altitude (Gikov
and Nedkov, 2005 ). The GIS map layers of the climatic indices are analyzed and ver-
ified using satellite images and forest cadastre data in order to create a map layer of
the potential landscapes in the area. CORINE Land Cover data are used as a basis to
create map layers for the contemporary landscapes. They are transformed and gen-
eralized to fit the working map scale and then intersected with the previously created
map layers. The landscape map was created using two-level classification scheme to
represent the hierarchical structure. The first level (landscape types) represents the
landscape differentiation caused by the influence of main flows of energy and mat-
ter, calculated by hydro-climatic indices. Land-use data were used at second level
for delineation of the contemporary landscapes. CORINE land cover classes have
been generalized to 11 land-use types, which represent the contemporary landscapes
of the area.
There are various methods used to estimate both market and non-market com-
ponents of the value of ecosystem services (Costanza et al., 1997 ). The valuation
needs synthesized approach based on a variety of methods used in different scien-
tific disciplines, noting the limitations and assumptions underlying each. The value
of ecosystem services is divided into three main types: ecological, socio-cultural
and economic (de Groot et al., 2002 ). The later can be divided into: (1) Direct
Market valuation; (2) Indirect Market valuation; (3) Contingent valuation; (4) Group
valuation. The first one is easily applicable for most provisioning services like
row materials, food or fresh water because of their wide use in the economy. The