National Ecosystem and Ecosystem Service Mapping Pilot for a Suite of Prioritised Services

Abstract

Although the importance of ecosystem services has been widely acknowledged as a way of communicating the contribution that biodiversity makes to human well-being, there are considerable practical challenges in applying the idea for policy and management purposes. This project has drawn on existing tools, approaches and data to demonstrate the kind of mapping that assists in the assessment of the state and trends of ecosystem services in Ireland. It was commissioned by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), and is a step towards establishing a framework for a National Ecosystem Assessment for Ireland within the context of the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. Like all EU Member States, Ireland is requested under Action 5 of the strategy and the subsequent MAES (Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services) Process to implement the action by mapping and assessing the state of ecosystems and the services they supply in their national territory. Information generated under the MAES Process will be used to value ecosystems and their services in the entire EU and promote the recognition of their economic worth into national and EU-level accounting and reporting systems.

This report describes how the project team worked with local stakeholders to identify which ecosystem services should be prioritised as part of the pilot, to identify what needs to be mapped and what can be mapped, taking into consideration existing national spatial data sources and developing indicators for national ecosystem service mapping. It sought to identify indicators that are appropriate for quantifying ecosystem service supply and demand, and document how they relate to different habitats and their associated characteristics. A series of maps have been produced and recommendations are made for taking forward the approaches demonstrated.

The ecosystem service “cascade” provides the conceptual framework for this project, and the basis for classifying ecosystem services using the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES). CICES has been used widely for supporting mapping and assessment projects; its standardised nomenclature enables regional comparisons to be made and it has been adopted as a framework for MAES.

The mapping tool chosen for this project was SENCE (Spatial Evidence for Natural Capital Evaluation), selected primarily for its ability to be manipulated to accept a wide range of data sources at different scales and its ability to deliver outputs for a variety of ecosystem services. It is a GIS system, which allows for stakeholder weighting to be applied and, therefore, local knowledge to be included.

In developing an ecosystem services framework for Ireland, it was essential to incorporate the contributions of a range of stakeholders, including organisations likely to be involved in implementing projects to restore ecosystems in Ireland, people with existing knowledge of environmental and societal issues and policy in Ireland, and technical experts and other stakeholders with knowledge of relevant data and projects. There were three main opportunities for stakeholder input; two stakeholder workshops and a review of modelling data and rules during mapping.

A workshop resulted in the identification of prioritised ecosystem services for Ireland which became the focus of the mapping work, namely the regulation of water quality and climate regulation through carbon storage. Biodiversity was identified as a factor of fundamental importance in underpinning ecosystem functioning and it was incorporated into the mapping to take account of its contribution in supporting the provision of ecosystem services.

Using the outputs of the stakeholder consultation workshops as a starting point, the project team examined the relevance of ecosystem services to stakeholder concerns within Ireland, and to policy areas that are the focus of current concern. This enabled the team to identify which of the many ecosystem services should be prioritised for consideration by the project, and which, given currently available data, could be analysed and mapped. An assessment was made of national and regional policy priorities and related work programmes. This helped identify principal areas of economic activity, including sectors and markets utilising living natural resources, which could be linked to the benefits from, or status and trends in, ecosystem services. In many areas, this review revealed a number of important cross-cutting issues. To bring together the many different policy driver and ecosystem themes, a table was created to define areas of interest which can be taken forward into the development of CICES sub-classes for Ireland ...