Mapping ecosystem services at the regional scale: the validity of an upscaling approach

ABSTRACT

Mapping ecosystem services (ES) over large scales is important for environmental monitoring but is often prohibitively expensive and difficult. We test a hybrid, low-cost method of mapping ES indicators over large scales in Pará State, Brazil. Four ES indicators (vegetation carbon stocks, biodiversity index, soil chemical quality index and rates of water infiltration into soil) were measured in the field and then summarized spatially for regional land-cover classes derived from satellite imagery. The regionally mapped ES values correlated strongly with independent and local measures of ES. For example, regional estimates of the vegetation carbon stocks are strongly correlated with actual measures derived from field samples and validation data (significant anova test – p-value = 4.51^e−9) and differed on average by only 20 Mg/ha from the field data. Our spatially-nested approach provides reliable and accurate maps of ES at both local and regional scales. Local maps account for the specificities of an area while regional maps provide an accurate generalization of an ES’ state. Such up-scaling methods infuse large-scale ES maps with localized data and enable the estimation of uncertainty of at regional scales. Our approach is first step towards the spatial characterization of ES at large and potentially global scales.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecosystem services mapping
• up-scaling
• remote sensing
• soil chemical quality
• soil infiltrability
• biodiversity
• carbon stocks
• Brazilian Amazon

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Institut des Amériques and two grants from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche: ANR AMAZ, coordinated by P. Lavelle, and ANR AGES, coordinated by X. Arnauld de Sartre. For the measurements of ecosystem service indicators, our thanks to Marlúcia B. Martins, George G. Brown, Maria del Pilar Hurtado, Izildinha de Souza Miranda, Thierry Desjardins, Eduardo Dias, Florence Dubs, Gregory Ferreira, Ivaneide S. Furtado, Ernesto Guevara, Tâmara Thaiz Santana Lima, Raphaël Marichal, Fernando Michelotti, Danielle Mitja, Izildinha Miranda, Norberto Cornejo Noronha, Mariana Nascimento Delgado Oliveira, Catarina Praxedes, Bertha Ramirez, Gamaliel Rodriguez, Rodolphe Rougerie, William Santos de Assis, Max Sarrazin, Mário Lopes da Silva Jr, Simão Lindoso de Souza, Elena Velasquez, Alex Velasquez and Patrick Lavelle.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors..

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche [AGES, AMAZ];Institut des Amériques [PhD Scholarship]