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3297406 
Journal Article 
A multi-criteria approach for an integrated land-cover-based assessment of ecosystem services provision to support landscape planning 
Koschke, L; Fuerst, C; Frank, S; Makeschin, F 
2012 
Yes 
Ecological Indicators
ISSN: 1470-160X
EISSN: 1872-7034 
21 
54-66 
WOS:000304849800006 
The article presents a multicriteria assessment framework
for the qualitative estimation of regional potentials to provide ecosystem services as a
prerequisite to support regional development planning. We applied this approach to a model region
in Saxony, Eastern Germany. For the estimation of the potentials of the model region to provide
ecosystem services, we used a modified approach compared to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment
(2005). We then employed a benefit transfer and a purely expert driven approach to assess
contribution of the land cover classes in our model region to the provision of ecosystern
services. In a subsequent step, the services in our set were combined to ecosystem services
groups that were designed together with regional actors, while considering their ideas, concerns
and experiences in regional decision making. The latter was analyzed in a weighting experiment,
in which different weighting approaches were tested. Based upon this, we analyzed the performance
of the model region to provide ecosystem services and generated ecosystem services distribution
maps. We could show that the different data gathering methods ""benefit transfer"" and ""expert-
based assessment"" have a considerable impact on the evaluation outcomes. The results of our
study show that the combination of selected services and land cover data can contribute to
regional planning by communicating the effect of land cover change on ecosystem services groups,
especially when applied as an evaluation basis in the tool Pimp Your Landscape (PYL). The
approach supports also the assessment of the performance of a region to provide ecosystem
services and the comparison of regions towards this aspect. Finally, we discuss the limitations
of our approach that are related to coarse land cover data, lacking knowledge on the provision of
ecosystem services at a landscape scale, and the difficulty to make relevant the ecosystem
services concept in regional planning processes. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 
Multi-criteria assessment; Benefit transfer; Expert-based assessment; Stakeholder weighting; Land cover; Ecosystem services; Landscape planning