Finland: OpenNESS, a consortium consists of research institutes from 22 European and four non-European countries, recently published a free-access paper entitled 'ESTIMAP: a GIS-based model to map ecosystem services in the European Union'. The paper introduces the Ecosystem Services Mapping tool (ESTIMAP), a collection of spatially explicit models to support the mapping and modelling of ecosystem services at European scale. Its main objective is to support EU policies with spatial information on where ecosystem services are provided and consumed.
Policies of the European Union which affect the use or protection of natural resources increasingly need spatial data on the supply, the flow and the demand of ecosystem services. The model was developed to this purpose. It adds spatial information with the objective to map various ecosystem services to land cover and land use maps
Source: OpenNESS
