The application of ecosystem assessments in land use planning: A case study for supporting decisions toward ecosystem protection

This paper proposes a flexible methodology for ecosystem assessment oriented to climate-change adaptation and mitigation policies focused on ecosystem protection. This analysis is based on a methodology developed at the European level which is adapted and applied in a specific Spanish context, providing a practical application that can be replicated in other European contexts after cartographic adaptation. The novelty of the proposed method is the inclusion of ecosystem assessment for land use planning as an element to consider when justifying the reasons for land protection. It involves three main steps. The first step introduces the spatial information of the different ecosystems of the study area, including the identification of ecosystem services (ES) and the capacity of the different ecosystems to provide them. The second step proposes the ecosystem assessment methodology at the regional and local planning scale based on the Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) project. The third step concerns the evaluation of the expected impacts on the ecosystems due to land-use-planning-related development trajectories to depict the possible negative consequences on ES. Such results show how the integration of ES assessments into land use planning tools could motivate land protection through providing evidence information on ecosystem risks, ES loss, or both.