Mapping Ecological Processes and Ecosystem Services for Prioritizing Restoration Efforts in a Semi-arid Mediterranean River Basin

46 páginas

[EN] 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.

The authors want to thank B. Reyers for inspiration and helpfulness and the research group CSIR, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of Stellenbosch (South Africa), especially D. le Maitre and J. Nel for their advice and patience and P. Ntshotsho for help with revising the manuscript. We thank M.P. Errea, J. Zabalza for the help with GIS analysis and E. Navarro for suggestions on improving the manuscript. This work was funded by Endesa S.A. through the collaborative agreement Endesa-CSIC for scientific research. M. Trabucchi was in receipt of a grant from the Board for Advanced Study, European Social Found, JAE-Doc, Ref. I3P-BPD-2006. This work is a contribution to the Labex OT-Med (no. ANR-11-LABX-0061) funded by the French Government « Investissements d’Avenir » program of the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the A*MIDEX project (no. ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02).

Peer reviewed