Geoscience Reference
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indirect methods use different techniques in order to reveal the Willingness To Pay
or Willingness To Accept compensation for the availability or loss of these services.
It includes Avoided costs (services allow society to avoid costs that would have
been incurred in the absence of those services), Replacement costs (services could
be replaced with human-made systems), etc. Contingent valuation uses social survey
questionnaire to express their willingness to pay for particular service. Group valu-
ation is a method derived from social and political theory based on the principles of
deliberative democracy.
The valuation of ecosystem services in Etropole municipality was made using
some of the values given in different investigations of the world ecosystems (de
Groot, 1994 ; Costsanza et al., 1997 ; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005 ) and
regional studies (MakKinnon and Yan, 2001 ; Barklay and Batker, 2004 ; EFTEC,
2005; Weber, 2005 ). The work of Zevurdakis et al. ( 2007 ) makes an attempt to
valuate the ecosystem services of the Rhodope Mountain area in Bulgaria. They also
recalculated all values in Bulgarian currency - BGN. Their results are useful source
for the situation in Bulgarian mountain areas, but they used CORINE land cover as
an initial spatial data for the evaluation. The values from all these sources have been
verified for the study area and corrected where necessary. For example, Zevurdakis
et al. ( 2007 ) valuated the provisioning functions from the forest ecosystems 282
BGN/ha/year but in the landscape typology there is a possibility to classify them in
more details. There are beech forests, hornbeam-oak forests and artificial coniferous
forest, which have some differences in their services. The beech forests in the higher
part of the area have higher disturbance regulation services, which were detected
using GIS-based hydrologic models (Nedkov, 2008 ; Nikolova et al., 2008 ). The
valuation of the mixed classes like forest-arable land areas has been calculated using
the values of the original land-use types reduced according to their share in the
particular area. The value of transitional woodland-shrub class was calculated by
reduction of the forest values with the services that this class is not able to support
(for example, timber production) or has less potential (regulation of disturbance
regime). For the review of ecosystem services, the chapter follows the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment typology, grouping the ecosystem services into four main
categories (see above). As the supporting services are considered to be necessary
for the production of all other services, they were not included in the valuation at
this stage of the investigation.
8.4 Results
The area of Etropole municipality belongs entirely to the mountain landscapes.
According to the classification scheme made by Velchev et al. ( 1992 ), modified
for mountain areas by Gikov and Nedkov ( 2009 ), there are 2 landscape types and
11 contemporary modifications (Fig. 8.2 ). The south part of the municipality is
occupied by temperate subhumid landscapes in the beech forests belt , which cover
25,180 ha (69% of the area of the municipality). They are located in the mountain
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