Developing a GIS toolkit to map ecosystem services at a county scale: including wildlife watching and nature experience in local decision making and strategic planning

To facilitate the implementation and mainstreaming of the ecosystem approach, we need tools to identify and map the multiple benefits provided to us by our natural environment at decision-making scales. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide a powerful platform for the visualisation and spatial analysis of ecosystem services at multiple scales, allowing service provision and demand to be evaluated and monitored in a spatially-explicit, quantitative manner, using data-driven and rule-based models. We developed a GIS toolkit that utilises widely accessible data to map a range of provisioning, regulating and cultural services, including tools to estimate the quality of greenspace for accessing nature and watching wildlife. Our mapping technique was piloted using the Durham Biodiversity Action Plan area, a large region (~3,000 km2) covering multiple local authorities and a wide range of habitats (including marine). The toolkit and user’s guide will be made available at the end of 2012, providing a transparent, standardised, easily implemented and geographically transferrable method for mapping ecosystem services at a county scale. The resulting fine resolution (≤50 m) maps provide quantitative tools for local and regional decision making, helping to ensure that networks of greenspace, and the range of services they provide, are protected, enhanced and connected at a landscape scale by informing strategic decisions, targeting conservation strategies, and stimulating innovative landscape planning. By estimating the probability of service occurrence over a continuum of environments, from protected areas to urban fringe grassland, the maps provide important information for those non-designated sites where data is currently lacking and whose importance is frequently underestimated in the planning process. These continuous service maps clearly illustrate the value of the multiple services delivered from our landscapes, ecosystems and wildlife sites, promoting sustainable development and providing a decision assisting tool to integrate ecosystem service assessments within the planning system.