Mapping ecological processes and ecosystem services for prioritizing restoration efforts in a semi-arid Mediterranean river basin.

Semi-arid Mediterranean regions are highly susceptible to desertification processes which can reduce the benefits that people obtain from healthy ecosystems and thus threaten human wellbeing. The European Union Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 recognizes the need to incorporate ecosystem services into land-use management, conservation, and restoration actions. The inclusion of ecosystem services into restoration actions and plans is an emerging area of research, and there are few documented approaches and guidelines on how to undertake such an exercise. This paper responds to this need, and we demonstrate an approach for identifying both key ecosystem services provisioning areas and the spatial relationship between ecological processes and services. A degraded semi-arid Mediterranean river basin in north east Spain was used as a case study area. We show that the quantification and mapping of services are the first step required for both optimizing and targeting of specific local areas for restoration. Additionally, we provide guidelines for restoration planning at a watershed scale; establishing priorities for improving the delivery of ecosystem services at this scale; and prioritizing the sub-watersheds for restoration based on their potential for delivering a combination of key ecosystem services for the entire basin.

Ecosystem service trends in basin-scale restoration initiatives: a review.

The integration of ecosystem services in ecological restoration projects presents an opportunity for enhancing benefits to human livelihood and funding sources as well as generating public support for such initiatives. This study reviewed the global trends in integrating ecosystem services in basin-scale restoration projects through bibliographic analysis. Few studies appear to incorporate ecosystem services, possibly due to the inconsistency and absence of the use of universally accepted classifications. Our review notes an increasing trend from 2006 onward toward the inclusion and citation of this concept, although its use is still limited. In this review, the supporting service was found to be the most cited (8), followed by regulatory (3), cultural (1) and provisioning (1) services. Identifying the number of services related to a restoration action was problematic when the services were not explicitly cited. We identify opportunities for increased integration of ecosystem services in basin-scale restoration projects, suggesting a conceptual framework following from new hierarchical maps. This is based on congruence between degrading processes or threat maps (e.g., thresholds of impacts) and ecosystem service maps. The resultant map will facilitate the targeting of threatened service supply at different scales from the basin scale to the scale of the restoration site. We urge the scientific community to standardize definitions and create methodologies and software tools that facilitate the incorporation of ecosystem services in large-scale restoration plans.