LF211 - Recreation potential maps (LUISA Platform REF2014)

The compressend zip file contains the projected recreation potential at NUTS0 and NUTS2 for the Danube regions from 2010 to 2050. The maps are stored in .csv format.

The compressend zip file contains the projected recreation potential at NUTS0 and NUTS2 from 2010 to 2050. The maps are stored in .csv format.

LUISA webpage (European Commission - JRC Science Hub)

The publication of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 requires a substantial effort in terms of operationalizing the ecosystem service concept. Target 2 of the Strategy in fact advocates that ecosystems and their services have to be “maintained and enhanced” in the current decade. This necessitates the development of methods to map and assess ecosystem services at regional and Country level, which is recognized under Action 5 of the strategy.

Research on ecosystem services mapping and valuing has boosted in recent years, nevertheless compared to other groups (provisioning, regulating) cultural ecosystem services are not yet fully integrated into operational frameworks. One reason is the transdisciplinarity which is required to address the issue: by their own definition cultural services (which encompass physical, intellectual, spiritual interactions with biota) need to be analysed from multiple perspectives (i.e. ecological, social, behavioural). A second reason is most likely the lack of data for large-scale assessments, being direct surveys a main source of information. Among cultural ecosystem services, assessment of outdoor recreation can be based on a large pool of literature developed mostly in social and medical science, and landscape and ecology studies. This paper presents a methodology to include recreation in the conceptual framework for EU wide ecosystem assessments (Maes et al., 2013), which couples existing approaches for recreation management at Country level with behavioural data derived from surveys and literature, and population distribution analysis. The result is a frame that can be applied to quantify the capacity of outdoor recreation as ecosystem service to citizens in the EU, and describe through Country profiles differences in provision, as input to land planning processes.

Mapping, visualization and the access to suitable data as a means to facilitate the dialogue among scientists, policy makers and the general public are among the most challenging issues within current ecosystem service science and application.

Recently the attention on spatially explicit ways to map ecosystem services, at local, regional and global scale is increasing. This report presents ESTIMAP: a suite of models for a spatially explicit assessment of three ecosystem services (recreation, pollination and coastal protection) at continental scale. The main objective of the models is to support EU policies with information on ecosystem services.