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Ecosystem services have become an important concept in policy-making. Carbon (C) sequestration into ecosystems is a significant ecosystem service, whereas C losses can be considered as an ecosystem disservice. Municipalities are in a position to make decisions that affect local emissions and therefore are important when considering greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation. Integrated estimations of fluxes at a regional level help local authorities to develop land use policies for minimising GHG emissions and maximising C sinks. In this study, the Finnish national GHG accounting system is modified and applied at the municipal level by combining emissions and sinks from agricultural land, forest areas, water bodies and mires (land use-related GHG emissions) with emissions from activities such as energy production and traffic (anthropogenic GHG emissions) into the LUONNIKAS calculation tool. The study area consists of 14 municipalities within the Vanajavesi catchment area located in Southern Finland. In these municipalities, croplands, peat extraction sites, water bodies and undrained mires are emission sources, whereas forests are large carbon sinks that turn the land use-related GHG budget negative, resulting in C sequestration into the ecosystem. The annual land use-related sink in the study area was 78tCO2eqkm(-2) and 2.8tCO2eq per capita. Annual anthropogenic GHG emissions from the area amounted to 250tCO2eqkm(-2) and 9.2tCO2eq per capita. Since forests are a significant carbon sink and the efficiency of this sink is heavily affected by forest management practices, forest management policy is a key contributing factor for mitigating municipal GHG emissions.

We report on preparatory work to develop a virtual laboratory for ecosystem services, ESLab, and demonstrate its pilot application in southern Finland. The themes included in the pilot are related to biodiversity conservation, climate mitigation and eutrophication mitigation. ESLab is a research environment for ecosystem services (ES), which considers ES indicators at different landscape scales: habitats, catchments and municipalities and shares the results by a service that utilizes machine readable interfaces. The study area of the pilot application is situated in the boreal region of southern Finland and covers 14 municipalities and ten catchments including forested, agricultural and nature conservation areas. We present case studies including: present carbon budgets of natural ecosystems; future carbon budgets with and without the removal of harvest residues for bioenergy production; and total phosphorus and nitrogen future loads under climate and agricultural yield and price scenarios. The ESLab allows researchers to present and share the results as visual maps, statistics and graphs. Our further aim is to provide a toolbox of easily accessible virtual services for ES researchers, to illustrate the comprehensive societal consequences of multiple decisions (e.g. concerning land use, fertilisation or harvesting) in a changing environment (climate, deposition).

At a global level, it is estimated that nearly two-thirds of ecosystem services have been degraded in just fifty years. The additional stresses imposed by climate change will require extraordinary adaptation. This paper synthesises main result of a large Finnish project studying the vulnerability of key ecosystem services to climate change and the possibilities for the individual sectors to adapt to these changes. The project based its work on data and infrastructures of nine intensively studied areas belonging to the Finnish LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) network. The methods developed and used included remote sensing, derivation of impact scenarios, dynamic modelling, laboratory experiments, interactive workshops and expert judgement. The results clearly indicated not only complex interactions between the different ecosystem processes but also trade-offs between the ecosystem services. Climate change was predicted to have both positive and negative effects on key ecosystem services in Finnish conditions, the results being sector-specific and scenario-specific. Provisioning services like food and timber production would largely benefit from increasing temperatures and prolongation of the growing season in the cool Finnish conditions (with e.g. estimated increases in growth rates of trees up to 80% and the introduction of a wider selection of crops), although increasing occurrence of factors such as fungal diseases and insect outbreaks were estimated to cause increasing risks. On the other hand, climate change was predicted to pose a major threat to several endangered and valuable species, water and air quality, and tourism services dependent on present climate conditions. Goal conflicts between maximising service production and meeting environmental quality objectives were also identified. Adaptation options and impact thresholds identified together with local enterprises and experts are presented.

Biochar addition to agricultural soil has been suggested to mitigate climate change through increased biogenic carbon storage and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. We measured the fluxes of N 2 O, CO 2 , and CH 4 after adding 9 t ha −1 biochar on an agricultural soil in Southern Finland in May 2009. We conducted these measurements twice a week for 1.5 months, between sowing and canopy closure, to capture the period of highest N 2 O emissions, where the potential for mitigation would also be highest. Biochar addition increased CH 4 uptake (96% increase in the average cumulative CH 4 uptake), but no statistically significant differences were observed in the CO 2 and N 2 O emissions between the biochar amended and control plots. Added biochar increased soil water holding capacity by 11%. Further studies are needed to clarify whether this may help balance fluctuations in water availability to plants in the future climate with more frequent drought periods.

We studied the role of vegetated littoral area in the efflux of methane (CH4) in a southern boreal landscape (1600 km2), in Finland, covered by 619 lakes. A regression model was constructed to describe the relationship between lake area or lake shoreline length and total macrophyte or total emergent macrophyte coverage. Phragmites australis and Equisetum fluviatile were by far the most widely distributed emergent macrophytes in the area with a proportion of 40% of all zone-forming macrophytes. The zone-forming floating-leaved species Nuphar lutea, Potamogeton natans and Sparganium spp. covered 44% of all vegetated littoral areas. The strong temperature dependence of the emission rates was taken into consideration in the emission estimations for P. australis and E. fluviatile. The regional efflux, estimated for the growing seasons 1998–2002, varied between 0.8×105 and 1.1×105 kg CH4 and between 1.6×105 and 2.4×105 kg CH4, respectively. The emissions from the stands of floating-leaved species were negligible compared to the emissions from stands of P. australis and E. fluviatile. This indicates that species specific emission rates and areal coverage of the dominating species, as well as ambient temperature, should all be carefully considered when estimating the total regional emissions of CH4 from lake littorals. The natural open ombrogenous bogs and minerogenous fens in the study region covered a 2.5-fold larger area than P. australis and E. fluviatile littoral, but their emissions were estimated to be only 78% of the emissions of P. australis and E. fluviatile, indicating that vegetated lake littoral is an important natural CH4 source in the region.

Methane emission and rhizospheric CH4 oxidation were studied in stands of Equisetum fluviatile, a common cryptogam in boreal lakes. The experiment was performed in mesocosms with organic sediment or sand bottoms under natural variation of temperature and light using the light-oxic – dark-anoxic chamber (LO/DA) technique. Net CH4 emission from the organic sediment during the growing season varied between 3.4 and 19.0 mg m−2 h−1, but from sand the net CH4 emission was only 3–10% of that measured from the organic sediment. In the organic sediment net CH4 emission was very significantly correlated with sediment temperature (r2 = 0.92). In the sand mesocosms the variation of net CH4 emission was better correlated with the shoot biomass than with sediment temperature variation during the growing season, indicating that methanogens were severely limited by substrate availability and were probably dependent on substrates produced by E. fluviatile. The proportion of the methane oxidized of the potential CH4 emission in summer did not differ significantly between the bottom types. The net CH4 emission during the growing season as a proportion of the seasonal maximum of the shoot biomass was significantly higher in the organic sediment mesocosms (6.5%) than in sand (1.7%). The high CH4 emissions observed from dense well-established E. fluviatile stands in the field appear to be more related to temperature-regulated turnover of detritus in the anaerobic sediment and less to CH4 oxidation and seasonal variation in plant growth dynamics

Summary 1. Spatial variation of methane (CH4) efflux from the littoral zone of a meso-eutrophic boreal lake was studied with a closed-chamber technique for three summer days in 22 vegetation stands, consisting of three emergent and three floating-leaved species. 2. Between-species differences in CH4 emission were significant. The highest emissions were measured from the emergent Phragmites australis stands (0.5–1.7 mmol m−2 h−1), followed by Schoenoplectus lacustris > Equisetum fluviatile > Nuphar lutea > Sparganium gramineum > Potamogeton natans. Within-species differences between stands were not significant. 3. In P. australis stands, the stand-specific mean CH4 emission was significantly correlated with solar radiation, probably indicating the role of effective pressurised ventilation on CH4 fluxes. The proportion of net primary production emitted as CH4 was significantly higher in P. australis stands (7.4%) than in stands of S. lacustris and E. fluviatile (both 0.5%). 4. In N. lutea stands, CH4 efflux was negatively correlated with the mean fetch and positively with the percentage cover of leaves on the water surface. There were no differences in CH4 efflux between intact N. lutea leaves and those grazed by coleopteran Galerucella nymphaeae. In S. graminaeum and P. natans stands, CH4 effluxes were not related to any of the measured environmental variables. 5. For all vegetation stands, the biomass above water level explained about 60% of the observed spatial variation in CH4 emission, indicating the important role of plants as gas conduits and producers of substrates for methanogens in the anoxic sediment.

Summary 1. Temperature and many other physical and chemical factors affecting CO2 production in lake sediments vary significantly both seasonally and spatially. The effects of temperature and sediment properties on benthic CO2 production were studied in in situ and in vitro experiments in the boreal oligotrophic Lake Paajarvi, southern Finland. 2. In in situ experiments, temperature of the water overlying the shallow littoral sediment varied seasonally between 0.5 and 15.7 °C, but in deep water (≥20 m) the range was only 1.1–6.6 °C. The same exponential model (r2 = 0.70) described the temperature dependence at 1.2, 10 and 20 m depths. At 2.5 and 5 m depths, however, the slopes of the two regression models (r2 = 0.94) were identical but the intercept values were different. Sediment properties (wet, dry, mineral and organic mass) varied seasonally and with depth, but they did not explain a significantly larger proportion of variation in the CO2 output rate than temperature. 3. In in vitro experiments, there was a clear and uniform exponential dependence of CO2 production on temperature, with a 2.7-fold increase per 10 °C temperature rise. The temperature response (slope of regression) was always the same, but the basic value of CO2 production (intercept) varied, indicating that other factors also contributed to the benthic CO2 output rate. 4. The annual CO2 production of the sediment in Lake Paajarvi averaged 62 g CO2 m−2, the shallow littoral at 0–3 m depth releasing 114 g CO2 m−2 and deep profundal (>15 m) 30 g CO2 m−2. On the whole lake basis, the shallow littoral at 0–3 m depth accounted for 53% and the sediment area in contact with the summer epilimnion (down to a depth c. 10 m) 75% of the estimated total annual CO2 output of the lake sediment, respectively. Of the annual production, 83% was released during the spring and summer. 5. Using the temperature-CO2 production equations and climate change scenarios we estimated that climatic warming might increase littoral benthic CO2 production in summer by nearly 30% from the period 1961–90 to the period 2071–2100.

In highly humic water, acridine orange precipitated with dissolved humic matter, resulting in such bright background fluorescence that no bacteria could be seen. With bisbenzimide staining, a similar precipitate was nonfluorescent but obscured many cells. An acriflavine staining method proved useful and reproducible both in clear and in humic waters. Fading of fluorescence was not a problem, and stained samples could be stored after preparation. The fluorescence of cells stained with acriflavine was weaker than that with acridine orange, making counting extremely small cells slightly more difficult with the former stain.

In situ enclosure experiments were performed in a highly humic lake to examine the effects of acidification on phyto-, bacterio- and zooplankton. The acidity of three enclosures was adjusted with H2SO4 to pH 3.5, 4 and 5 and one enclosure and the lake served as controls. The diversity of plankton as well as the mean concentration of chlorophyll α, primary production and respiration of plankton decreased with increasing acidity. Bacterial density was slightly lower in the pH 3.5 enclosure than in the other enclosures and in the lake, but there were no differences in the morphological type or mean volume of the cells between different treatments. In the acidified enclosures Cryptomonas ovata and Chlamydomonas spp. were the dominant phytoplankters, while Dinobryon and Mallomonas species seemed to be most sensitive to acidity. Keratella cochlearis, Kellicottia longispina and Bosmina longispina were the most tolerant zooplankton to acidity.