Ecosystems are critically important to our well-being and prosperity as they provide us with food, clean air or fresh water and they maintain a livable biosphere. Consequently, ecosystem services are increasingly considered as crucial argument to support decision making in policies that affect the use or the state of natural resources. In particular, new biodiversity policies, which have been adopted at global and EU scales, have set targets to safeguard biodiversity as well as to maintain the supply of ecosystem services. Achieving biodiversity targets requires demonstrating that changes in policies affecting natural resources are beneficial to human well-being through the enhanced flow of ecosystem services. It also requires prioritizing investments and making them cost-effective based on a sound knowledge base and assessment methods. This study has contributed case studies to help exploring how such assessments might be developed at multiple spatial scale, in particular for pollination, recreation and water purification. The spatial assessment of these ecosystem services included maps displaying the potential and actual supply of these services in both biophysical and monetary units. Scenarios were used to estimate changes in the flow of ecosystem services and to estimate benefits that arise from policy changes. Our approaches show that the inclusion of the ecosystem services concept into policies would allow a systematic review of the consequences of policy measures for services beyond conventional environmental assessments.

Although methodologies for classification, quantification, and valuation of ecosystem services are improving drastically, applications of the ecosystem services concept in day-to-day decision-making processes remain limited, especially at the planning level. Nevertheless, spatial planning decisions would benefit from systematic considerations of their effects on ecosystem services. Assessing the impacts of policy on a wide range of ecosystem services contributes to more cost-effective policy implementation, establishing win-win situations across different environmental domains. The “nature value explorer” (natuurwaardeverkenner in Dutch) is a web application developed to explore the quantity and value of ecosystem services in Flanders, Belgium, as part of environmental impact assessments. The tool estimates the impact of land-use and land-cover change on regulating and cultural ecosystem services. The web application is successful in drawing the interest of policy makers and is used in several cases to support decisions in infrastructural projects as well as nature restoration projects.

"The new book Mapping Ecosystem Services provides a comprehensive collection of theories, methods and practical applications of ecosystem services (ES) mapping, for the first time bringing together valuable knowledge and techniques from leading international experts in the field." (www.eurekalert.org).

A balanced review of differing approaches based on remote sensing tools and methods to assess and monitor biodiversity, carbon and water cycles, and the energy balance of terrestrial ecosystem. Earth Observation of Ecosystem Services highlights the advantages Earth observation technologies offer for quantifying and monitoring multiple ecosystem functions and services. It provides a multidisciplinary reference that expressly covers the use of remote sensing for quantifying and monitoring multiple ecosystem services. Rather than exhaustively cover all possible ecosystem services, this book takes a global look at the most relevant remote sensing approaches to estimate key ecosystem services from satellite data. Structured in four main sections, it covers carbon cycle, biodiversity, water cycle, and energy balance. Each section contains a review of conceptual and empirical methods, techniques, and case studies linking remotely sensed data to the biophysical variables and ecosystem functions associated with key ecosystem services. The book identifies relevant issues and challenges of assessment, presents cutting-edge sensing techniques, uses globally implemented tools to quantify ecosystem functions, and presents examples of successful monitoring programs. Covering recent developments undertaken on the global and national stage from Earth observation satellite data, it includes valuable lessons and recommendations and novel ways to improve current global monitoring systems. The book delineates the use of Earth observation data so that it can be used to quantify, map, value, and manage the valuable goods and services that ecosystems provide to societies around the world.

In recent years, there has been a marked proliferation in the literature on economic approaches to ecosystem management, which has created a subsequent need for real understanding of the scope and the limits of the economic approaches to ecosystems and