What is the Development Capacity for Provision of Ecosystem Services in the Czech Republic?

Abstract

The aim of our study is to identify the evolution of land use and the landscape capacity to provide selected ecosystem services (ESs) over the past 28 years. The results obtained should answer whether the recorded land cover development has manifested in the same way as the development of landscape capacity to provide ESs for four different services. Corine Land Cover (CLC) data are used to describe the land cover for five time periods (1990, 2000, 2006, 2012, and 2018) for the area of interest—the whole of the Czech Republic Identification of persistence area. The main trajectories of land cover developments are calculated using overlay spatial operations in GIS. For each analyzed year of landscape development, land cover is evaluated separately, and basic quantification indicators are calculated. At the same time, the filling capacity of selected ESs is evaluated. The results show that the assessed area had the highest capacity to provide ecological integrity in 1990–2006, and then this slightly decreased due to category changes. From a spatial point of view, the worst development trend is seen for provisioning services, where negative development is represented almost all over the country. Ecological integrity and regulating services have similar spatial characteristics of development.