Mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services : an EU wide ecosystem assessment in support of the EU biodiversity strategy.

Abstract

Europe’s ecosystems, on which we depend for food, timber, clean air, clean water, climate regulation and recreation, suffer from unrelenting pressures caused by intensive land or sea use, climate change, pollution, overexploitation and invasive alien species. Ensuring that ecosystems achieve or maintain a healthy state or a good condition is thus a key requirement to secure the sustainability of human activities and human well-being. This guiding principle applies for all ecosystems including marine and freshwater ecosystems, natural and semi-natural areas such as wetlands or heathlands but also managed ecosystems such as forests, farmlands and urban green spaces. Knowledge about ecosystem condition, the factors that improve or decline that condition, and the impacts on ecosystem services, with the benefits they deliver to people, is key to effective management, decision-making and policy design. Such an understanding helps target actions for conservation or restoration and more broadly sustainable use. The Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 includes the development of an integrated framework to monitor whether the actions undertaken are delivering on the ground. This assessment presents the changes in pressures and ecosystem condition in the EU and its marine regions using the year 2010 as a policy baseline. The following ecosystems are analysed: urban ecosystems, agroecosystems (croplands and grasslands), forests, wetlands, heathlands and shrub, sparsely vegetated lands, rivers and lakes, and marine ecosystems. The assessment is based on the best available European data. In addition, this report contains crosscutting assessments on climate change, invasive alien species, landscape mosaic, soil and ecosystem services.