The idea aims to stimulate further development of the one of SDI4Apps pilots dealing with “Ecosystem services evaluation”. Main ambition is to create the single web/mobile website/portal prototype tool (human readable interface) allowing to raise awareness of the relevance of biodiversity and the ecosystem services and explain the complex concepts and benefits related to the Ecosystem services evaluation in a simple way to the wider public. At the same time tool shall provide also the domain experts with the possibility to create the zonal statistics from the outcomes of the ecosystem services evaluation and share related spatial data/services, documents (eg.  methodologies, or models) in connection to the work done via ESP visualisation tool, including the projects (e.g. MAES catalogue of case-studies) describing the particular implementations of ecosystem services. For machine readable interface, where possible appropriate API will be made available to strengthen the further reuse of the resources.

Wider context

EcoSystem Services (ESS) represents the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems to the human well-being. Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 calls Member States to map and assess the state of ecosystems and their services in their national territory. Pilot aims to provide in connection to the Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Service (MAES) activities the common interface facilitating the access and exchange of the knowledge and resources related to the topic of ESS with the possibility to visualise the ecosystem services values for particular location of the interest on national level with the potential for re-use in other countries or for links to EU level. Pilot aims to address the challenges identified during the MAES Delivery Workshop organized in Brussels on 15-16 December 2015, particularly in area of:

• strengthening  and  using  the  knowledge  base  on  biodiversity  and  ecosystem  services  in  order to contribute  to halting biodiversity  loss  and  reach  the  EU  2020  biodiversity  target
• where possible re-use the activities and their outcomes already done via ESP-VT and DRDSI and Openness projects

End-user demand

At this moment, the main user demand comes from research and public sector domain, mainly from authorities involved into the activities related to the implementation of the Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020.

When  completed  by  the  2020  target,  the  mapping  and  assessment  of  ecosystems  and  their  services ,  and   the   valuation   and   accounting   work will   allow   public   decision – makers   and   private – sector  stakeholders  to  better  understand  how  our  economy  and  society  depend  on  healthy,  resilient  and  productive ecosystems  and to ensure that inter-dependencies between human  activities and ecosystem  condition are adequately taken into account in  planning  and  decision making at all levels.

At the same time methodologies and input and output data can be of wide use also for the national and local activities driven by the non-governmental sector aiming to improve the quality of the life as well as strengthen the governance transparency via participatory approach (Open government participation OGP).

In case of Slovakia, set of possible target stakeholders have been identified during the collection of the user requirements process. They cover all main types of authorities and individuals from public sector, through private, R&D, non governmental authorities to the citizens.

Essential components:

• Content management system CMS
• User management system
• Storage for resources for spatial (vector, gridded data) and non spatial (documents, media) resources . Storage shall support relational and semantic store options
• Transformation component
• Processing/Calculation component
• Publication component

Foreseen functionality:

• User registration and maintenance
• Possibility to upload, store and maintain resources
• Transformation of the spatial data resources
• Data processing and calculations (e.g. Zonal statistics)
• Publication of the resources (via webinterface of CMS, via web services, API)

Short methodology approach overview:

• Re-use or development of the web interface of the  ESS Portal
• Design and implementation of processing functionality supporting the mapping ESS and calculating the zonal statistics as an outcomes of the ESS evaluation
• Possible use cases for the ESS projects to be provided as initial case-studies:
  • ESS utilisation for the evaluation of landscape potential to provide the recreational services
  • ESS in city/urban environment

Foreseen datasets to be used:

• Reference data for ecosystem mapping
• Relevant data from DRDSI catalogue
• Datasets from the initial version of ESS pilot
• Relevant data from Baltic Open (Geo) Data Hackathon 2016
• Data from LENGTH
• Data from SK INSPIRE Open Land Use Map
• Selected and available national datasets from Slovakia

Foreseen software / models components:

• SDI4Apps framework/enablers
• Geonetwork / CKAN for metadata
• GeoDCAT-AP via
  • GeoDCAT-AP XSLT
  • GeoDCAT-AP API source code
  • GeoDCAT-AP API demo
  • GeoDCAT-AP implementations
• OpenDataNote for data transformations
• Geoserver for publication of the data
• LD proxy: WFS2LD

Results from Baltic Hack:

• Alignment of the pilot with the SDI4Apps development and enablers
  • Design adjustment (Lighter graphical user interface)
  • Re-use of selected enablers (GeoServer,  Post GIS)
  • Enrichment of the pilot with the SK Open Land Use Map

• Support for data processing and calculations (e.g. Zonal statistics)

Link: http://skpilot-viewer.virt.ics.muni.cz/ol3/eng/map-dev.html#

Presentation of the results: https://goo.gl/aKE6c2

Contact: martin.tuchyna@sazp.sk