Abstract
Natural ecosystems are a source of services that are necessary for the functioning of the human society. Agricultural ecosystems are actively managed by humans to optimize the provision of food, fiber and fuel.
These ecosystem services from agriculture, classified as provisioning services by the recent Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, depend in turn upon a web of supporting and regulating services as inputs to production. In the contribution, we use illustrative examples of concepts capturing ecosystem services embodied in the international trade.
These include land use and biocapacity embodied in traded agricultural products. Our study assesses the impact of commodity imports into the Czech Republic of land conversion in the countries of origin of primary commodities (exporting countries).
We use the actual land demand as the main indicator of socio-economic metabolism demand on ecosystem services embodied in international trade. This concept is focused on the utilization and consumption of renewable sources for defined population and on impact of human activities on the land area.
Demand on ecosystem services is assessed by selected ecosystem indicator Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP). We use geographical information system for data integration and the analysis of spatial overlap of commodities production and effects on selected indicators.
Result of this work will be a model to capture relation between size of imported land area and affected ecosystem service indicators. The creation of maps will illustrate the link between demands on actual land area needed for production and the loads on ecosystem services.
We can anticipate that import of primary products to the Czech Republic increases and this activity influences land area and ecosystem services of specific territory of exporting countries. We also expect larger impact to ecosystem services in developing countries than in developed due to more dynamic land use change processes.