Abstract
Ecosystem services are important to maintain the human well-being. However, their provisioning has been under the increasing pressure from both natural and socio-economic changes. This paper aims to assess the most significant hazards, such as water quality, nitrogen deposition, erosion, floods, invasive species, urbanisation and contaminated sites affecting delivery of ecosystem services in the Czech Republic. Using the multi-hazard assessment, the integrated risk index for ecosystem service provisioning was proposed. The spatial analysis based on this approach was then applied to the Czech Republic as a case study. The results showed that about 48% of the area falls into the very low risk category followed by 30%, 21%, and 1% for low, medium and high categories, respectively. Forest and wetland ecosystems were estimated to have the highest proportion of their total area among the highest risk values. Moreover, we found that the national parks appeared to have the highest proportion of medium- and high-risk classes among the natural areas. The approach presented in this study should aggregate the existing knowledge on ecosystem services and hazards and thus monitor the integrated risk. The results are intended to help with various planning and management decisions at both the national and regional levels and to bring more attention on the most problematic hot-spots.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic, Security Research Grant No. VG20122015091, Integrated assessment of global change impacts on environmental security of the Czech Republic. This work was also supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic within the National Sustainability Program I (NPU I), Grant No. LO1415. The authors also would like to thank the organizers of the 2014 Summer Institute for Disaster and Risk Research at Beijing Normal University (the State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology at Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China) and D. Geneletti for comments and suggestions, which helped to improve the methodology. Lastly, the authors would like to acknowledge J. Krása for providing the erosion data and P. Pyšek and J. Wild for providing the invasive species data.
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Pártl, A., Vačkář, D., Loučková, B. et al. A spatial analysis of integrated risk: vulnerability of ecosystem services provisioning to different hazards in the Czech Republic. Nat Hazards 89, 1185–1204 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-017-3015-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-017-3015-z