GIS Application for Forest Territories Providing Water Ecosystem Services

Abstract

Protecting forests and maintaining their water conservation function has proven to be the most effective approach to generating and maintaining water quantity from the source to the end user. The water conservation and water regulating properties of forest ecosystems that are inherent in forested areas are an undervalued resource at the current stage. To turn this property into a source of income, it needs to be institutionalized as a production function of forest owners. This also defines the main aim of this research, namely to design and implement a system for mapping the territorial distribution and characteristics of sanitary protection zones in Bulgaria, which will help assess the condition and determine the value of ecosystems and ecosystem services. In this regard, this paper presents the approaches used to integrate and design the spatial data of the sanitary protection zones and the database of the forests in Bulgaria in a repository and the system created to visualize these data through different approaches.