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Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) has been widely applied on the European Union (EU) mainland, whereas the EU Overseas entities still bear potential for implementation. This paper presents novel applications of the MAES procedure in the EU Outermost Regions and Overseas Countries and Territories ("EU Overseas"). Eight case studies from different geographical areas were analysed through a comparative assessment by applying an established framework following key steps in the MAES process, in order to stipulate lessons learned and recommendations for MAES in the EU Overseas. These key steps include the identification of policy questions, stakeholder networks and involvement, application of MAES methods, dissemination and communication and implementation. The case studies were conducted and analysed under the umbrella of the EU MOVE pilot project, including the Azores, the Canary Islands, Saint Martin, French Guiana, Martinique, Reunion Island and the Falkland Islands. Each case study represented different governance, policy and decision-making frameworks towards biodiversity and environmental protection. Case studies predominantly addressed the policy domains of Nature and Biodiversity Conservation and Marine and Maritime Policy. Ecosystem Services (ES) were assessed across a wide range of themes, biomes and scales, focusing on terrestrial, coastal and marine ecosystems. Results show that the implementation of the case studies was accompanied by extensive communication and dissemination activities. First success stories were visible, where the MAES exercise led to meaningful uptake of the ES concept to policies and decision-making. Yet, there is still work to be done - major bottlenecks were identified related to the MAES implementation centring around financial resources, training and technical expertise. Addressing these aspects can contribute to an enhanced implementation of MAES in the EU Overseas in the future.

LEGATO stands for “Land-use intensity and Ecological EnGineering—Assessment Tools for risks and Opportunities in irrigated rice based production systems.”

A selection of commonly encountered ES mapping bottlenecks that relate to seven themes: i) map-maker map-user interaction; ii) nomenclature and ontologies; iii) skills and background; iv) data and maps availability; v) methods-selection; vi) technical difficulties; and vii) over-simplification of mapping process/output. The authors synthesise the variety of solutions already applied by map-makers and map-users to mitigate or cope with these bottlenecks and discuss the emerging trade-offs amongst different solutions. Tackling the bottlenecks described here is a crucial first step towards more effective ES mapping, which can in turn ensure the adequate impact of ES mapping in decision-making.

© 2017, The Author(s). In a cross-disciplinary project (LEGATO) combining inter- and transdisciplinary methods, we quantify the dependency of rice-dominated socio-ecological systems on ecosystem functions (ESF) and the ecosystem services (ESS) the integrated system provides. In the collaboration of a large team including geo- and bioscientists, economists, political and cultural scientists, the mutual influences of the biological, climate and soil conditions of the agricultural area and its surrounding natural landscape have been analysed. One focus was on sociocultural and economic backgrounds, another on local as well as regional land use intensity and biodiversity, and the potential impacts of future climate and land use change. LEGATO analysed characteristic elements of three service strands defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA): (a) provisioning services: nutrient cycling and crop production; (b) regulating services: biocontrol and pollination; and (c) cultural services: cultural identity and aesthetics. However, in line with much of the current ESS literature, what the MA called supporting services is treated as ESF within LEGATO. As a core output, LEGATO developed generally applicable principles of ecological engineering (EE), suitable for application in the context of future climate and land use change. EE is an emerging discipline, concerned with the design, monitoring and construction of ecosystems and aims at developing strategies to optimise ecosystem services through exploiting natural regulation mechanisms instead of suppressing them. Along these lines LEGATO also aims to create the knowledge base for decision-making for sustainable land management and livelihoods, including the provision of the corresponding governance and management strategies, technologies and system solutions.

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In a cross-disciplinary project (LEGATO) combining inter- and transdisciplinary methods, we quantify the dependency of rice-dominated socio-ecological systems on ecosystem functions (ESF) and the ecosystem services (ESS) the integrated system provides. In the collaboration of a large team including geo- and bioscientists, economists, political and cultural scientists, the mutual influences of the biological, climate and soil conditions of the agricultural area and its surrounding natural landscape have been analysed. One focus was on sociocultural and economic backgrounds, another on local as well as regional land use intensity and biodiversity, and the potential impacts of future climate and land use change. LEGATO analysed characteristic elements of three service strands defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA): (a) provisioning services: nutrient cycling and crop production; (b) regulating services: biocontrol and pollination; and (c) cultural services: cultural identity and aesthetics. However, in line with much of the current ESS literature, what the MA called supporting services is treated as ESF within LEGATO. As a core output, LEGATO developed generally applicable principles of ecological engineering (EE), suitable for application in the context of future climate and land use change. EE is an emerging discipline, concerned with the design, monitoring and construction of ecosystems and aims at developing strategies to optimise ecosystem services through exploiting natural regulation mechanisms instead of suppressing them. Along these lines LEGATO also aims to create the knowledge base for decision-making for sustainable land management and livelihoods, including the provision of the corresponding governance and management strategies, technologies and system solutions.

We present options for a National Ecosystem Assessment in Germany (NEA-DE) that could inform decision-makers on the state and trends of ecosystems and ecosystem services. Characterizing a NEA-DE, we argue that its cross-sectoral, integrative approach would have the advantages of increased scientific understanding, addressing specific policy questions and creating science-policy dialogues. Challenges include objections against a utilitarian perspective, reservations concerning power relations, and responsibilities concerning the funding.

The social-ecological systems of rice terraces across Southeast Asia are the result of centuries of long-term interactions between human communities and their surrounding ecosystems. Processes and structures in these systems have evolved to provide a diversity of ecosystem services and benefits to human societies. However, as Southeast Asian countries experience rapid economic growth and related land-use changes, the remaining extensive rice cultivation systems are increasingly under pressure. We investigated the long-term development of ecosystem services and the adaptive capacity of the social-ecological system of rice terrace landscapes using a case study of Banaue (Ifugao Province, Northern-Luzon, Philippines). A set of indicators was used to describe and assess changes in the social-ecological state of the study system. The resilience of the rice terraces and the human communities that maintain them was examined by comparing the current state of the system with results from the literature. Our findings indicate that, although the social-ecological system has not yet shifted to an alternative state, pressures are increasing and some cultural ecosystem services have already been lost.

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Target 2, Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy requests member states “to map and assess ecosystems and their services” (Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services – MAES initiative). The objective of this paper is to present and discuss the preliminary outcomes of the approach taken to define indicators for implementing MAES in Germany. The paper introduces the requirements for using indicators from a perspective of nature conservation policy, in particular the need to discern the demand and supply of ecosystem services, including their potentials, actual and future use, as well as the natural contributions and human inputs to the generation of ecosystem services. An adapted, differentiated, ecosystem services terminology is presented and a first set of indicators is introduced and explained. The paper closes with an estimate of potential benefits of information produced by implementation of a national MAES for various fields of policy (e.g. local and regional landscape planning) and proposes some recommendations for further research and practical exploration.

Continuing global population growth requires an increase in food production, but also new strategies to reduce negative effects of intensive land use on the environment. Rice as key staple food for a majority of the human population is of crucial importance for global and particularly Southeast Asian food supply. As food provision is one key ecosystem service (ES), it is important to know which ESs are provided at which places. Therefore, an ES scoring exercise harnessing local experts’ knowledge in a ‘rapid assessment’ was conducted in seven rice cropping regions in Vietnam and the Philippines. The expert-based scoring values were linked in an ‘ES-matrix’ to the different land use/land cover (LULC) classes abundant in the study areas. The LULC classifications were based on SPOT satellite image interpretation. The matrices were used to compile ES supply maps that give first indications about ES in regions with different intensive agriculture. The outcomes provide a first ‘screening’ of ES supply related to different LULC types in rice-dominated regions enabling the communication of the relevance of specific ecosystems for local communities and decision makers. Uncertainties inherent in expert- and land cover-based ES assessments are discussed and recommendations for improvements of future studies are given

The use of ecological indicators in models has been a highly relevant topic in science and practice for several decades. Ecological indicators is a broad and diverse topic: for ecosystem and landscape organisation depiction, ecosystem health assessments, theoretical foundations of ecosystem dynamics, ecosystem service analyses, applications in environmental management, or human-environmental system analysis. The use of models is not less manifold, including not only computer-based simulation models but also conceptual models, data models, landscape models, hierarchy models, gradient models, theoretical and network models as well as economic and societal models. This Special Issue of Ecological Modelling is dedicated to our highly appreciated colleague Prof. Felix Mueller from Kiel, Germany, celebrating his 60th birthday in November 2014. We brought together a diverse and very international group of colleagues which accompanied Felix during the last decades and produced this collection of high quality scientific articles in a Special Issue. The topics of the 21 articles in the Special Issue are related to Felix' life and work, full of ecosystem indication, ecosystem theory, systems analysis, ecological modelling, ecosystem services, holistic indicator sets, and gradients on various spatial, temporal and interpersonal scales.

Safeguarding the benefits that ecosystems provide to society is increasingly included as a target in international policies. To support such policies, ecosystem service maps are made. However, there is little attention for the accuracy of these maps. We made a systematic review and quantitative comparison of ecosystem service maps on the European scale to generate insights in the uncertainty of ecosystem service maps and discuss the possibilities for quantitative validation. Maps of climate regulation and recreation were reasonably similar while large uncertainties among maps of erosion protection and flood regulation were observed. Pollination maps had a moderate similarity. Differences among the maps were caused by differences in indicator definition, level of process understanding, mapping aim, data sources and methodology. Absence of suitable observed data on ecosystem services provisioning hampers independent validation of the maps. Consequently, there are, so far, no accurate measures for ecosystem service map quality. Policy makers and other users need to be cautious when applying ecosystem service maps for decision-making. The results illustrate the need for better process understanding and data acquisition to advance ecosystem service mapping, modelling and validation.

Better integration of knowledge from ecological, social and economic science is necessary to advance the understanding and modelling of socio-ecological systems. To model ecosystem integrity (EI) and ecosystem services (ES) at the landscape scale, assessment matrices are commonly used. These matrices assign capacities to provide different services to different land cover types. We revised such an existing matrix and examined the regional heterogeneity in EI and ES provision in Europe and searched for spatial gradients in their provision to elucidate their suitability for large-scale EI and ES mapping in Europe. Overall, 28 sites belonging to the Long-Term Ecological Research network in Europe participated in this study, covering a longitudinal gradient from Spain to Bulgaria and a latitudinal gradient from Italy to Sweden. As a primary outcome, an improved and consolidated EI and ES matrix was achieved with 17.5% of all matrix fields updated. For the first time, this new matrix also contains measures of uncertainty for each entry. EI and ES provision assessments were more variable for natural and semi-natural than for more anthropogenically dominated land cover classes. Among the main types of EI and ES, cultural service provision was rated most heterogeneously in Europe, while abiotic provisioning services were more constant. Longitudinal and latitudinal EI and ES gradients were mostly detected in natural and semi-natural land cover types where temperature and precipitation are major drivers. In anthropogenically determined systems in which cultural services play a dominant role, temperature and precipitation gradients were less important. Our results suggest that this matrix approach to assess EI and ES provision principally works on broad spatial scales; however, local assessments for natural systems seem to be less generalizable than assessments from anthropogenically determined systems. Provisioning and regulating services are more generalizable than cultural s

The management of biodiversity represents a research topic that needs to involve not only several (sub-) disciplines from the natural sciences but, in particular, also the social sciences and humanities. Furthermore, over the last couple of years, the need for the integration of other kinds of knowledge (experience based or indigenous knowledge) is increasingly acknowledged. For instance, the incorporation of such knowledge is indispensable for place-based approaches to sustainable land management, which require that the specific ecological and social context is addressed. However, desirable as it may be, such an engagement of the holders of tacit knowledge is not easy to achieve. It demands reconciling well-established scientific procedural standards with the implicit or explicit criteria of relevance that apply in civil society — a process that typically causes severe tensions and comes up against both habitual as well as institutional constraints. The difficulty of managing such tensions is amplified particularly in large integrated projects and represents a major challenge to project management. At the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research — UFZ, several integrated research projects have been conducted over the past years in which experience has been gained with these specific challenges. This paper presents some of the lessons learned from large integrated projects, with an emphasis on project design and management structure. At the centre of the present contribution are experiences gained in the coordination and management of LEGATO (LEGATO stands for Land-use intensity and Ecological EnGineering — Assessment Tools for risks and Opportunities in irrigated rice based production systems, see www.legato-project.net), an ongoing, large-scale, inter- and transdisciplinary research project dealing with the management of irrigated rice landscapes in Southeast Asia. In this project, local expertise on traditional production systems is absolutely crucial but need

Spatial planning is often affected by conflicting sectoral interests. Frequently, this results in unsustainablemanagement practices. Integrating the concept of ecosystem services into planning and decision-making can facilitate communica tion among decision-makers from sectors like landscape and urban planning,agriculture or water management. The concept accounts for a broad spectrum of quantitative andqualitative data from local to international level, thus revealing the benefits humans derive fromecosystem goods and functions.We propose that the concept of ecosystem services can complement existing policy instruments that focus solely on a specific task or sectoral interest.

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