Europes ecological backbone.pdf

Ecosystem services from Europe's mountains
4 Ecosystem services from Europe's
mountains
Ecosystem services (ES) are the 'benefits that
humans recognise as obtained from ecosystems
that support, directly or indirectly, their survival
and quality of life' (Harrington et al., in press,
expanded from MA, 2003) and mountain ecosystems
provide a multitude of these essential services
to humankind across Europe and globally. The
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the most
comprehensive global examination of the state
of the world's ecosystems and the services they
provide, defined four major categories of services:
provisioning, regulating and cultural services that
directly benefit people, and the supporting services
needed to maintain the direct services (MA 2005a).
Provisioning services are products obtained from
ecosystems (e.g. food, water, timber), regulating
services are benefits obtained from regulation
of ecosystem processes (e.g. water purification,
pollination), cultural services are non‐material
benefits obtained from ecosystems (e.g. recreation,
aesthetic experiences) and supporting services are
services necessary for the provision of all other
ecosystem services (e.g. soil formation, nutrient
cycling). However, while the first three of these
categories are uncontroversial and generally
accepted, there is considerable controversy over the
validity and usefulness of supporting services. The
uncertainties come from two directions. First, there
is no simple dividing line between what constitutes
regulating and supporting services, so some workers
prefer to pool these together. Second, the opinion
of many ecologists is that supporting services are
not services at all, but ecosystem processes and
properties which are an integral part of ecosystem
functions that happen independently of human
benefit or valuation. This chapter follows the
most updated service classification provided by
the MA (Carpenter et al., 2009) for provisioning,
regulating and cultural services, without referring
to ecosystem processes as supporting services. It
is based particularly on the most recent appraisal
of the status and trends of ecosystem services in
Europe as documented by the RUBICODE project
(www.rubicode.net), funded by the European
Commission as a 6th Framework Coordination
Action Project, and by the scientific publications
resulting from that project.
Chapter 24 of the MA (Körner et al., 2005) assessed
the conditions and trends associated with mountain
biota and their ecosystem services at the global
scale, treating regulating and supporting services
together. The authors of this chapter highlight the
exceptionally high multifunctionality of mountains
(see also Messerli and Ives, 1997). Thus mountains
provide a disproportionately large number of
ecosystem services to many human communities.
A key issue here is that the service beneficiaries —
the humans affected positively by the provision
of a particular service (see Harrington et al., in
press) — include not only the local residents of the
mountains, but also people inhabiting the lowlands.
Mountain ecosystems can only continue to provide
all these services in a rapidly changing world if
such multifunctionality is taken into account in their
management. However, to manage for multiple
ecosystem services we must first identify, quantify
and value the full suite of services provided by
mountains. The remainder of this chapter is an
account of the present state of the art.
The wide spectrum of mountain ecosystem services
arises from a diverse range of 'ecosystem providers'
within mountain ecosystems. Ecosystem service
providers (ESPs) are the component populations,
communities, functional groups of organisms,
interaction networks or habitat types that provide
ecosystem services (Luck et al., 2009, adapted from
Kremen, 2005). The ESP approach is paralleled
by a similar concept, that of the service providing
unit (SPU): the collection of individuals of a given
species and their characteristics necessary to
deliver an ecosystem service at the desired level
(Luck et al., 2009, adapted from Luck et al., 2003).
This also allows for negative influences and the
necessity for trade-offs within ecosystems by
recognising the concept of the ecosystem service
antagoniser: an organism, species, functional
group, population, community, or trait attributes
thereof, which disrupts the provision of ecosystem
services and the functional relationships between
them and ESPs (Harrington et al., in press).
Although originally developed independently,
these two approaches have now been brought
together, so that ESP and SPU should represent
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Europe's ecological backbone: recognising the true value of our mountains