Assessing the potential supply of landscape services to support ecological restoration of degraded landscapes: A case study in the Austrian-Hungarian trans-boundary region of Lake Neusiedl

The concept of ecosystem functions and services has increasingly gained attention in the scientific and political community in the last decade. Lot of work has been performed to assess the actual delivery of different services for society. Still, the reference of the landscape's potential to supply these actual services has not been investigated satisfactory so far. We thus aimed at assess the potential supply of landscape services in the study area of Lake Neusiedl in Austria - a region of acknowledged diversity and environmental quality - and compared these to the actual ones. We did this by setting up a map of constructed vegetation type where physiographic site conditions were used to calculate potential land cover in the area in GIS. These constructed vegetation types were linked to landscape services within a capacity matrix giving a weight between 0 (no supply) and 5 (high supply) to which amount one type can provide each single service. The resulting map showed large differences in areal extent of the different vegetation types reflecting the different landscapes in the region such as the dominance of forest steppe in the terraced landscapes or the occurrence of halophytic vegetation only in the lake basin. The same is true for the different landscape services. Some services like 'nursery' and 'raw materials' were quite highly provided throughout the area with values between 2.12 and 4.84, whereas 'genetic resources' and 'pollination' were only little provided (all values <2). On the other hand, functions like 'nutrient regulation' or 'refugium' exhibited their large potential with values >4 in the study area. The aggregation of the services by averaging values to finally derive three main service groups gave the highest values always to habitat (values between 3.1 and 4.8), followed by regulation (2.5-4.2) and then provision (1.9-3.2). Comparing the potential with the actual service supply, nearly all landscapes in the study area resulted in higher potential than the actual service supply. We further discuss possibilities to use the potential supply as a leitbild where restoration projects might be settled in the study area even though more detailed local data will be needed to set these projects up. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.