Ecosystem service availability in view of long-term land-use changes: a regional case study in the Czech Republic

AbstractThis study aims to analyze how changes in land use influenced the delivery of ecosystem services in Cezava, a South Moravian agricultural region in the Czech Republic, in the period of 1845–2010. An observation of this period covering more than 160 years made it possible to reflect on social forces driving processes of transformation in the country. To capture the landscape multifunctionality and to indicate the environmental quality of the area under study, seven services provided in parallel by arable land, forests, and bodies of water were studied. The quantification of ecosystem services is based primarily on the transfer of values from the existing literature and on chronicle reviews and map analysis. Because looking back to the more distant past is a challenge and reliable information resources are lacking, a simple scoring method defining the functional features of the ecosystems was applied in order to evaluate the change of qualitative characteristics of the observed ecosystems. Besides t...