Ecosystem service availability in view of long-term land use changes: a regional case study from the Czech Republic
Abstract
This study aims to analyse how land-use changes influenced the delivery of ecosystem services in Cezava, a South Moravian agricultural region in the Czech Republic, in the period 1845-2010. An observation of this period covering more than 160 years made it possible to reflect on social forces driving processes of transformation in the country.
To capture the landscape multifunctionality and to indicate the environmental quality of the area under study, seven services provided in parallel by arable land, forests and bodies of water were studied. The quantification of ecosystem services is based primarily on the transfer of values from the existing literature and on chronicle reviews and map analysis.
Because looking back to the more distant past is a challenge and reliable information resources are lacking, a simple scoring method defining the functional features of the ecosystems was applied in order to evaluate the change of qualitative characteristics o f the observed ecosystems. Besides that, the findings of these assessments were supported by an analysis performed using landscape metrics.
A comparison of service provision over the decades revealed that regulating and cultural services were significantly reduced while provisioning services increased due to the proliferation of arable land, land consolidation and agricultural intensification. However, a trend of improvement in the delivery of ecosystem services was introduced after 1990.
Despite several uncertainties, this study demonstrates that it is possible to analyse long-term land-use trends to generate more meaningful, spatially explicit information, which can form the basis for landscape planning and ecosystem management.