Accounting for forest condition in Europe based on an international statistical standard.

Covering 35% of Europe's land area, forest ecosystems play a crucial role in safeguarding biodiversity and mitigating climate change. Yet, forest degradation continues to undermine key ecosystem services that forests deliver to society. Here we provide a spatially explicit assessment of the condition of forest ecosystems in Europe following a United Nations global statistical standard on ecosystem accounting, adopted in March 2021.

A sustainability scoreboard for crop provision in Europe.

The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (SEEA AFF) offers the possibility to assess and report detailed accounts for primary industries while establishing important linkages with relevant ecosystem services, in line with the SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA). In this paper, crop products and crop provision as ecosystem service are coherently merged to build a sustainability scoreboard for selected crops in European countries. The sustainability scoreboard uses the SEEA AFF accounts for crop products with data inputs from FAOSTAT and the Integrated system of Natural Capital Accounts (INCA) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) for ecosystem services.

Accounting for changes in flood control delivered by ecosystems at the EU level.

Ecosystem service accounts require quantifying the contribution of ecosystems to the society. However, estimation of the ecosystem service used (actual flow) remains still very challenging for regulating services. We developed an experimental ecosystem service account for flood control delivered by ecosystems including: 1) Biophysical modelling of ecosystem service potential, demand and actual flow.

How ecosystem services are changing: an accounting application at the EU level.

Ecosystem services accounts are a useful tool that provides relevant information on the role of ecosystems in delivering services, and the society benefiting from them. This paper presents the accounting workflow for ecosystem services at the European Union level adopted by the Knowledge Innovation Project on an Integrated system for Natural Capital and ecosystem services Accounting (KIP INCA) - a European Commission initiative. The workflow includes: 1) biophysical assessment of ecosystem services; 2) monetary valuation; and 3) compilation of accounting tables.

Ecosystem services accounts: Valuing the actual flow of nature-based recreation from ecosystems to people.

Natural capital accounting aims to measure changes in the stock of natural assets (i.e., soil, air, water and all living things) and to integrate the value of ecosystem services into accounting systems that will contribute to better ecosystems management.

Capacity as "virtual stock" in ecosystem services accounting.

Interest in ecosystem services accounting is growing exponentially. There are many un-solved issues that need to be addressed, the notion of capacity is among them. International guidelines suggest that capacity should constitute the link between the ecosystem assets accounts and the ecosystem services accounts.

Beyond the economic boundaries to account for ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services (ES) accounts are essential to quantify and monitor the contribution of ecosystems to human well-being. The System of Environmental and Economic Accounting - Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA) is the first attempt to provide a set of standards to compile ecosystem accounts. We argue for the inclusion of an ecological perspective in the SEEA EEA that considers ecosystems to be more than input providers to the economy.

Dangers of predicting bird species distributions in response to land-cover changes.

Land-cover changes from the last decades are leading to important declines in habitat quality, giving rise to changes in bird species distribution all over the world. However, land-cover changes result from a variety of different processes, and it is not clear how effective species distribution models are in capturing species responses to these changes. In this study, we evaluated our ability to predict the effects of land-cover changes on shifts in species distributions at large spatial and temporal scales using Mediterranean landscapes and early-successional, open-habitat birds as study models.