This report presents and justifies a method to quantify ecosystem services provided by river corridors in biogeochemical and monetary terms. The method is readily applicable with a checklist in excel format, worked out tables, and in a summary of possible services and their ranges encountered in the literature. In line with the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, the method starts from the commonly accepted breakdown in provisionary, regulatory, and cultural services and combines this with the land cover typology of CORINE/EUNIS harmonised for Europe, to reflect the different habitats that are present in a river corridor. It sums the service fluxes per habitat. The method is developed within REFORM, but similar approaches can be found in the literature, e.g. the river Frome (SW England), the Cota Donana landscape (S Spain), the Willamette River valley (W USA), or the whole of Lapland (Finland). The method is currently being applied at the REFORM flagship cases. First results suggest that restoration has greatly increased societal value in the river Regge (Netherlands, from 3800 to 5800 €/ha/yr), Skjern Aa (Denmark, from 800 to 3700 €/ha/yr), but not in the Narew River (Poland). When the individual river analyses are complete, a comparative analysis will compare them with societal indicators of welfare, economic sector strength, demography,  and river indicators of water quality and biodiversity.

Further Links

Link to D2.3 on the REFORM website: http://www.reformrivers.eu/deliverables/d2-3

Author

Jan Vermaat, Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam