Irina Bergström

ESLab application to a boreal watershed in southern Finland: preparing for a virtual research environment of ecosystem services.

Abstract We report on preparatory work to develop a virtual laboratory for ecosystem services, ESLab, and demonstrate its pilot application in southern Finland. The themes included in the pilot are related to biodiversity conservation, climate mitigation and eutrophication mitigation. ESLab is a research environment for ecosystem services (ES), which considers ES indicators at different landscape scales: habitats, catchments and municipalities and shares the results by a service that utilizes machine readable interfaces. The study area of the pilot application is situated in the boreal region of southern Finland and covers 14 municipalities and ten catchments including forested, agricultural and nature conservation areas. We present case studies including: present carbon budgets of natural ecosystems; future carbon budgets with and without the removal of harvest residues for bioenergy production; and total phosphorus and nitrogen future loads under climate and agricultural yield and price scenarios. The ESLab allows researchers to present and share the results as visual maps, statistics and graphs. Our further aim is to provide a toolbox of easily accessible virtual services for ES researchers, to illustrate the comprehensive societal consequences of multiple decisions (e.g. concerning land use, fertilisation or harvesting) in a changing environment (climate, deposition).

Boreal forests can have a remarkable role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions locally: Land use-related and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and sinks at the municipal level

Ecosystem services have become an important concept in policy-making. Carbon (C) sequestration into ecosystems is a significant ecosystem service, whereas C losses can be considered as an ecosystem disservice. Municipalities are in a position to make decisions that affect local emissions and therefore are important when considering greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation. Integrated estimations of fluxes at a regional level help local authorities to develop land use policies for minimising GHG emissions and maximising C sinks. In this study, the Finnish national GHG accounting system is modified and applied at the municipal level by combining emissions and sinks from agricultural land, forest areas, water bodies and mires (land use-related GHG emissions) with emissions from activities such as energy production and traffic (anthropogenic GHG emissions) into the LUONNIKAS calculation tool. The study area consists of 14 municipalities within the Vanajavesi catchment area located in Southern Finland. In these municipalities, croplands, peat extraction sites, water bodies and undrained mires are emission sources, whereas forests are large carbon sinks that turn the land use-related GHG budget negative, resulting in C sequestration into the ecosystem. The annual land use-related sink in the study area was 78tCO2eqkm(-2) and 2.8tCO2eq per capita. Annual anthropogenic GHG emissions from the area amounted to 250tCO2eqkm(-2) and 9.2tCO2eq per capita. Since forests are a significant carbon sink and the efficiency of this sink is heavily affected by forest management practices, forest management policy is a key contributing factor for mitigating municipal GHG emissions.