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The article reports on the 100th anniversary of the Slime Estuary Nature Reserve located at the Baltic Sea coast. It mentions habitat changes that result primarily from changes in the vegetation cover impacting repeated shifts in the populations of the main breeding bird species. It also mentions While the breeding colony of common gulls, herring gulls and terns was initially able to move to the area of ​​the Olpenitz peninsula, the breeding numbers in this area are also very low.

Many cities are witnessing ongoing urban densification and urbanisation processes that are leading to far-reaching changes in ecosystems. These ecosystem changes are further compounded by climate change and the loss of biodiversity. However, urban ecosystems that can provide multiple ecosystem services (ES) are of essential importance for the health and social well-being of the growing urban population. Therefore, the concept of urban ES is creating increasing scientific and political interest, especially in Europe. Numerous indicators are used to generate new information about urban ES, but their informative value is of varying quality. In the course of a systematic analysis of articles, this review surveys the context of these articles, looks at current research activities in the field of urban ES, and introduces the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services, CICES 5.1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessments of ecosystem services (ES) are vital for Africa’s sustainability. ES supply and demand take place in distinctive patterns in Africa due to the continent’s characteristic spatial heterogeneity, rich biodiversity, demographic developments, resource endowment, resource management conflicts, and fragile political landscapes, along with current industrialization and urbanization processes. Ignorance of the dynamism of these parameters could diminish the capacity of the different ecosystem service providing units (SPU) to satisfy the demands in the ecosystem service benefiting areas (SBA) in Africa. The main aim of this review article is to assess the extent to which ES studies have been conducted and applied in Africa. This review analyzes those articles accessible online via the ISI Web of Science and open access journals. The online search yielded 52 ES-related studies, which were used for the review. Results indicate that most studies were conducted in South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania, and focused on services provided by watersheds and catchment ecosystems. Crucially, most of the studies focused on more than one ES category. Provisioning ES dominated across all the ES categories. However, ES tradeoffs and synergies were barely addressed. Economic valuation of ES and ES mapping comprised more than three-quarters of all the studies, and a quarter referred to biophysical quantification or qualification of ES. There are emerging alternative, non-monetary valuation methods for ES, which could pave a new way of capturing value of non-monetized ES in Africa. Moreover, there is an urgent need to extend ES studies to the entire continent, in order to capture spatial and socio-economic uniqueness of various countries and focus more on local-scale assessments of multiple ES, as a means for addressing ES tradeoffs, synergies and SPU-SBA relations in Africa.

It has been widely accepted that ecosystem services (ESs) should be taken into account in natural resource management decisions. Hence, there is an increasing need for innovative quantification methods and tools to evaluate ESs on different landscape scales, and under varying land-use forms. Integrating biodiversity protection with the provision of ESs is a key element for sustainable land-use planning. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis, together with various environmental data, provide a suitable foundation for ESs evaluations. Recent advances in earth observation technologies have supported land-cover-based ESs mapping on global, regional and local scales. Global and regional land-cover maps can help in coarse assessments of some biophysical characteristics of the environment, but they cannot provide exact information about local biodiversity and biotope types that form the base of ESs supply. Therefore, more detailed tools such as aerial photographs and field surveys are needed. High-quality biotope data are usually fragmentary or absent for private land in Finland, but are available for most state-owned commercial forests and protection areas. We tested the use of biotope data derived from aerial photographs and an extensive field inventory to map ESs in natural protection areas in northern Finland. We argue that protection areas, where large and long-term databases have been collected, offer excellent study sites to develop further the methodology for integrating coarse-scale remote-sensing data, such as CORINE, with more detailed ecological and structural data collected from aerial photographs and ground surveys. In addition, the use of detailed biotope data supports the linkage of biodiversity information with landscapes' capacities to provide ESs. Different data sources will improve the management of protection areas, thereby optimizing multiple land-use objectives.

Although the concept of ecosystem services has drawn a prolific amount of recent research, little work has been done on the links between marine ecosystem services and coastal human well-being at a regional scale. Key questions in this context are that of appropriate categories for assessing human well-being and how to link different determinants of human well-being to specific ecosystem services supplied in adjacent marine areas. This paper presents the results of a case study that links tangible and intangible ecosystem benefits to a range of material and immaterial factors constituting human well-being. Determinants of human well-being were defined and indicators selected to make these linkages traceable. Ecosystem services were assessed for the offshore environment along the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, based on the assumption of strong future development of offshore wind farming and considering the environmental and socio-economic impacts of such developments on the coastal region. This paper illustrates some conceptual problems in linking ecosystem benefits to human well-being. Based on an economic analysis and a questionnaire survey, two examples are presented where an evidence-based link could be demonstrated between an ecosystem service impacted by offshore wind farming and change in human well-being. The results presented should be understood as an analytic framework and precondition for gathering empirical data.