Resource information
It has been widely accepted that ecosystem services (ESs) should be taken into account in natural resource management decisions. Hence, there is an increasing need for innovative quantification methods and tools to evaluate ESs on different landscape scales, and under varying land-use forms. Integrating biodiversity protection with the provision of ESs is a key element for sustainable land-use planning. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis, together with various environmental data, provide a suitable foundation for ESs evaluations. Recent advances in earth observation technologies have supported land-cover-based ESs mapping on global, regional and local scales. Global and regional land-cover maps can help in coarse assessments of some biophysical characteristics of the environment, but they cannot provide exact information about local biodiversity and biotope types that form the base of ESs supply. Therefore, more detailed tools such as aerial photographs and field surveys are needed. High-quality biotope data are usually fragmentary or absent for private land in Finland, but are available for most state-owned commercial forests and protection areas. We tested the use of biotope data derived from aerial photographs and an extensive field inventory to map ESs in natural protection areas in northern Finland. We argue that protection areas, where large and long-term databases have been collected, offer excellent study sites to develop further the methodology for integrating coarse-scale remote-sensing data, such as CORINE, with more detailed ecological and structural data collected from aerial photographs and ground surveys. In addition, the use of detailed biotope data supports the linkage of biodiversity information with landscapes' capacities to provide ESs. Different data sources will improve the management of protection areas, thereby optimizing multiple land-use objectives.
