Spatial and Economic Values of Ecosystem Services : The Case of Sweden's Forests

Abstract: The objective of this licentiate thesis is to determine the value of ecosystem services and their relative importance, and to develop methods to weight these benefits against the market value of timber and other uses for forests. These issues are addressed in two papers with a focus on spatial modeling of ecosystem services and the method of benefit transfer. The aim is to contribute to the research regarding the optimal social use of forests for Sweden in particular and the future of forestry in general, particularly when it comes to ecosystem services and the tradeoff between demands for different forest products.The first article is a review study of previous studies estimating monetary valuations of ecosystem services of forests during the past 20 years. The review has a particular focus on spatial modeling of ecosystem services and the underlying characteristics that influence the value of an ecosystem service. In total, 118 studies are included in the review, and themajority of these studies do not model the spatial distribution of the ecosystem services and assume it identical across the area that is being studied, but the share of spatially explicit studies is increasing in the last ten years. The review finds that carbon sequestration, recreation, and ecosystem services related to the prevention of natural hazards,e.g. floods and avalanches, are the forest based ecosystem services that consistently are valued highly in the reviewed studies. There is however, significant variation in the values reported for similar ecosystem services.The second article is focused estimates the value of recreation and carbon sequestration in Swedish forests, using the benefit transfer approach and a spatially explicit perspective. The distribution for the services is mapped for the whole country, and the monetary value applied to the services is based on comparisons between the results of previous studies. The aim of the article is to develop the use of spatial mapping on larger scales than has been done previously, and add to the limited number of ecosystem service valuations for the Nordic countries by providing a fully populated spatial mapping of two of the more important ecosystem services of Sweden. In general, values found for the two ecosystem services are almost as high as timber values, but the values and their distribution varies highly across the landscape. Both ecosystem services are found to have higher values in southern Sweden and close to cities.