Hermann Klug

On the Effects of Scale for Ecosystem Services Mapping

Ecosystems provide life-sustaining services upon which human civilization depends, but their degradation largely continues unabated. Spatially explicit information on ecosystem services (ES) provision is required to better guide decision making, particularly for mountain systems, which are characterized by vertical gradients and isolation with high topographic complexity, making them particularly sensitive to global change. But while spatially explicit ES quantification and valuation allows the identification of areas of abundant or limited supply of and demand for ES, the accuracy and usefulness of the information varies considerably depending on the scale and methods used. Using four case studies from mountainous regions in Europe and the U.S., we quantify information gains and losses when mapping five ES - carbon sequestration, flood regulation, agricultural production, timber harvest, and scenic beauty - at coarse and fine resolution (250 m vs. 25 m in Europe and 300 m vs. 30 m in the U.S.). We analyze the effects of scale on ES estimates and their spatial pattern and show how these effects are related to different ES, terrain structure and model properties. ES estimates differ substantially between the fine and coarse resolution analyses in all case studies and across all services. This scale effect is not equally strong for all ES. We show that spatially explicit information about non-clustered, isolated ES tends to be lost at coarse resolution and against expectation, mainly in less rugged terrain, which calls for finer resolution assessments in such contexts. The effect of terrain ruggedness is also related to model properties such as dependency on land use-land cover data. We close with recommendations for mapping ES to make the resulting maps more comparable, and suggest a four-step approach to address the issue of scale when mapping ES that can deliver information to support ES-based decision making with greater accuracy and reliability.

A SMART groundwater portal: An OGC web services orchestration framework for hydrology to improve data access and visualisation in New Zealand

Transboundary and cross-catchment access to hydrological data is the key to designing successful environmental policies and activities. Electronic maps based on distributed databases are fundamental for planning and decision making in all regions and for all spatial and temporal scales. Freshwater is an essential asset in New Zealand (and globally) and the availability as well as accessibility of hydrological information held by or held for public authorities and businesses are becoming a crucial management factor. Access to and visual representation of environmental information for the public is essential for attracting greater awareness of water quality and quantity matters. Detailed interdisciplinary knowledge about the environment is required to ensure that the environmental policy-making community of New Zealand considers regional and local differences of hydrological statuses, while assessing the overall national situation. However, cross-regional and inter-agency sharing of environmental spatial data is complex and challenging. In this article, we firstly provide an overview of the state of the art standard compliant techniques and methodologies for the practical implementation of simple, measurable, achievable, repeatable, and time-based (SMART) hydrological data management principles. Secondly, we contrast international state of the art data management developments with the present status for groundwater information in New Zealand. Finally, for the topics (i) data access and harmonisation, (ii) sensor web enablement and (iii) metadata, we summarise our findings, provide recommendations on future developments and highlight the specific advantages resulting from a seamless view, discovery, access, and analysis of interoperable hydrological information and metadata for decision making.

A Spatial Data Infrastructure Approach for the Characterization of New Zealand's Groundwater Systems

The future information needs of stakeholders for hydrogeological and hydro-climate data management and assessment in New Zealand may be met with an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards-compliant publicly accessible web services framework which aims to provide integrated use of groundwater information and environmental observation data in general. The stages of the framework development described in this article are search and discovery as well as data collection and access with (meta)data services, which are developed in a community process. The concept and prototype implementation of OGC-compliant web services for groundwater and hydro-climate data include demonstration data services that present multiple distributed datasets of environmental observations. The results also iterate over the stakeholder community process and the refined profile of OGC services for environmental observation data sharing within the New Zealand Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) landscape, including datasets from the National Groundwater Monitoring Program and the New Zealand Climate Database along with datasets from affiliated regional councils at regional- and sub-regional scales. With the definition of the New Zealand observation data profile we show that current state-of-the-art standards do not necessarily need to be improved, but that the community has to agree upon how to use these standards in an iterative process.

Assessing drinking water consumption by inhabitants and tourists in the Alps using a WebGIS for information distribution

In the Alps, regional water balances are stressed by an imbalance between the distribution of naturally available water and the anthropogenic water demand. Due to the growing request for freshwater, water resources will have a tendency to decline in future which may cause impacts on water-related ecosystem services for the society. We use European-level statistics to model the alpine drinking water consumption rates of local residents and tourists using the Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics from Eurostat at two levels (NUTS 2 and NUTS 3). Using the spatial distribution of local residents and tourists as well as the compiled daily water consumption rates, we modelled the amount of water consumed between 1990 and 2008. In the Greater Alpine Region (GAR) water consumption rates from the population on NUTS 3 level increased from 8.3 million m3 per day during the 1990s to 11.2 million m3 per day in 2008. The water consumption rates of both residents and tourists show an increase in central southern areas of the GAR from 1990 to 2000. This trend continues to the south-western part of the GAR between 2000 and 2008. Thus, the drinking water consumption of inhabitants and tourists is highest in places where hydro-climate changes indicate trends of declining naturally available water resources.

An online platform supporting the analysis of water adaptation measures in the Alps

Climate change may result in reduced water supply from the Alps – an important water resource for Europe. This paper presents a multilingual platform that combines spatial and multi-criteria decision-support tools to facilitate stakeholder collaboration in the analysis of water management adaptation options. The platform has an interactive map interface that allows participants to select a location of their interest within the Alpine Arc. By utilising the decision-support tool, stakeholders can identify suitable adaptation solutions for different geographical units, according to their experience and preference. The platform was used to involve experts across Alpine borders, domains and decision-making levels, as well as a group of university students. The experts favoured the planning instruments for saving water, while the students inclined towards the measures that would improve water conservation. The initial results confirmed the suitability of the platform for future involvement of decision-makers in spatio-temporal analyses of adaptation pathways in the Alps.

Enhancing Location-Related Hydrogeological Knowledge

We analyzed the corpus of three geoscientific journals to investigate if there are enough locational references in research articles to apply a geographical search method, such as the example of New Zealand. Based on all available abstracts and all freely available papers of the “New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics”, the “New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research”, and the “Journal of Hydrology, New Zealand”, we searched title, abstracts, and full texts for place name occurrences that match records from the official Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) gazetteer. We generated ISO standard compliant metadata records for each article including the spatial references and made them available in a public catalogue service. This catalogue can be queried for articles based on authors, titles, keywords, topics, and spatial reference. We visualize the results in a map to show which area the research articles are about, and how much and how densely geographic space is described through these geoscientific research articles by mapping mentioned place names by their geographic locations. We outlined the methodology and technical framework for the geo-referencing of the journal articles and the platform design for this knowledge inventory. The results indicate that the use of well-crafted abstracts for journal articles with carefully chosen place names of relevance for the article provides a guideline for geographically referencing unstructured information like journal articles and reports in order to make such resources discoverable through geographical queries. Lastly, this approach can actively support integrated holistic assessment of water resources and support decision making.