Mapping of nutrient regulating ecosystem service supply and demand on different scales in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

This study deals with one of the regulating ecosystem services, nutrient regulation. In order to guarantee sustainable land management, it is of great relevance to gain spatial information on this ecosystem service. Unsustainable land management with regard to nutrient regulation may, for example, result in eutrophication which has been identified as a major threat for the environmental state of our water bodies. In the first step of research, the potential supplies and demands of/for nutrient regulation were assessed and mapped at two different spatial scales: The German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein (regional scale) and the Bornhöved Lakes District (local scale). The assessment was undertaken for nitrogen, as an exemplary nutrient. Subsequently, potential supply and demand, combined with the nitrate leaching potential and the groundwater nitrate concentration, were incorporated into a correlation analysis. The data was statistically analysed with varying pre-processing and spatial resolutions. The statistical analysis reveals that large scale data with low resolution leads to more uncertain results. Decreasing the spatial scale and increasing the resolution of the data through a spatially more explicit assessment, leads to more explicit results. It is striking that the study reveals a spatial mismatch between the potential supply and demand for the ecosystem service nutrient regulation, which denotes unsustainable land management in the study areas.