A review of forest ecosystem services and their spatial valuation characteristics

• Forests provide a variety of resources and benefits, but only a few such as timber are traded on markets. Ecosystem service valuation is a method to quantify the non-market benefits of forests in order to understand the full costs of forest management. This review goes through ecosystem service valuations of forests during the past 20 years, with a particular focus on spatial modeling of ecosystem services. The findings are that there is a huge variation in the values reported for similar ecosystem services, but that carbon sequestration, recreation in forests, and hydrological services such as watershed protection and flood prevention are the ecosystem services that consistently are valued highly in the reviewed studies. In the last ten years, studies are more frequently modeling ecosystem services spatially.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Nationalekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Ecosystem services

Review

Spatial modeling

Forest

Valuation methods

Economics

Nationalekonomi

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)