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MAPPING AND QUANTIFYING ECOSYSTEM SERVICES RELATED TO WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN A HUNGARIAN CATCHMENT- MAPPING WATER YIELD

Bence Decsi

Abstract

Quantifying and mapping ecosystem services (ESs) is one of the most developing opportunities for presenting the relationship between natural capital and society. This method helps decision-makers and stakeholders in the complex evaluation of straightforward (provisioning) and more difficult to interpret (supporting, regulating and cultural) type of services, and to take them in account in decision making. This can be a significant step ahead in the proper assessment of non-material services, which could help optimizing the use of natural resources. As the first step of an overall ES assessment, we quantified and mapped the most important water resources related service of the Zala River basin in Western Hungary. Zala is the main source of Hungary's largest standing water, Lake Balaton. The Zala catchment area is 1521 km2, and its land use is dominated by agricultural and forest areas (around 57% and 37%), the soils of the watershed are erodible. We used the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) model, which offers static GIS based methods to map 18 different ESs. We quantified four of these services in the Zala catchment, from which the mapping of Water Yield is presented in this paper. We built up a model for the conditions representing the 1981-2010 interval. We divided the 30 years long interval into three periods, so adjustment of the biophysical parameters was carried out for the annual water yield. We also did sensitivity analysis for the most important model parameters. Our results points out where are the regions in the catchment, where the actual land use and land cover conditions are not appropriate according to the mapped Water Yield, where the yields had high values. There could be supposed a massive supply of eroded sediment and bound nutrient. These fields have also losses on other ESs because eroded sediment and bound nutrient causes problems in downslope areas. These parcels have an enormous effect on the Zala River?s and Lake Balaton?s water quality. Our study highlights the areas of the river basin that are critical. In parallel, it suggests that land use and land cover intervention in these areas would be necessary.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2019/3.1/s12.045

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