Ecosystem service provisioning in the Grand-Est, France

Ecosystem services are at the forefront of ecosystem management, and are a featured component of each research themes of the Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation, et l’Environnement (INRAE). The national research program Transition en Territoires de l'Agriculture, l'Alimentation et l'Environnement (TETRAE) represents INRAE’s long-term commitment to the sustainable management of agricultural, ecological, and urban environments. The project Perceptions et valorisation des services écosystémiques en forêt (PERCEVAL) is funded under the TETRAE program. Specifically, it seeks to assess potential markets for biodiversity and ecosystem services in forests in the Grand-Est region of France, and to develop a digital platform where economic partners and local stakeholders can access its findings to better inform their management decisions. In this document, we provide a baseline database of the supply or provisioning of ecosystem services in the Grand-Est region of France. We estimate a set of eighteen indicators of seven ecosystem services, which include agriculture production potential, biodiversity, aboveground carbon storage, livestock grazing potential, net ecosystem productivity, pollination potential, and soil loss by water erosion. Our analysis uses a mix of land use and land cover data, established relationships between ecosystem services and land use/reflectance data, and published maps of ecosystem service supply from the scientific literature. We use information regarding the locations of agriculture, cities, and forests as well as topography to understand some of the potential drivers of ecosystem service supply in the Grand Est, and measure the interactions – how a change in one service leads to a change in another – between ecosystem services considered in the study. In full transparency, we provide support documentation for our study. This includes metadata, code, and data for estimating ecosystem services in the Grand Est. In general, our findings are consistent with the scientific literature and what we would expect given our models and the data used to estimate them. While we would not recommend interpreting our results as absolute point measurements of ecosystem service supply at specific locations, we do believe that they do a good job at showing where ecosystem services are being supplied in the Grand Est. We discuss our results in the context of ecosystem management in Grand Est – specifically the importance of forests in the region – and how they fit into the broader question of what should be provided from the perspective of society. Finally, we provide a discussion of the limitations of our study.