Protected areas around the world are increasingly being recognized for their potential to protect various ecosystem services in addition to biodiversity. We carried out an ecosystem services (ES) assessment at the Rizoelia National Forest Park, a biodiversity hotspot in Cyprus. For ES assessment we used TESSA v.1.1 and an ES matrix-approach to map the capacity of habitat types in the area. According to TESSA the most important ES provided by the study area are aesthetic benefits, recreation/ tourism, biodiversity, global climate regulation, and environmental education. Total Carbon stock was estimated to 14247.327 tonnes and the total number of annual visits was 14471. There were no statistically significant differences in the number of visits among visitation periods but there were statistically significant differences among National Holidays, Weekends and Weekdays. We identified that plantations had the highest capacity for most groups of services particularly where their understory comprises semi-natural habitat types rich in biodiversity. This is the first study in Cyprus which provides a preliminary quantification of ES in a protected area context using widely employed tools. The paper discusses how these findings can help decision-makers to plan direct future restoration and management actions to the benefit of a wide range of stakeholders.

ES matrix-approach, island, mapping, Natura 2000, TESSA

Worldwide the designation of protected areas aims to separate the components of biodiversity from natural or anthropogenic processes that threaten their persistence (Margules and Pressey 2000). This notion has been expanded over the years (see IUCN 1994, MA 2005) and while safeguarding biodiversity remains a Protected Area’s (PA) primary aim, increasingly they are also considered to play a key role in the maintenance of ecosystem processes and the ecosystem services they provide (Bastian 2013; Watson et al. 2014). It is thus vital to assess the extent to which existing protected area systems represent those services. Local protected areas are an important resource for policy makers since they can be a real benefit to local populations. In an urban / peri-urban setting, the role of PAs is inextricably linked to quality of life, while at the same time they remain under intensive pressure from urban expansion and land-use/cover changes (Grimm et al. 2008). The paradox is that the negative effects of these changes to biodiversity result in turn in deterioration of ecosystem services (MA 2005), but at the same time human-induced actions may increase biodiversity of urban nature (Savard et al. 2000). The provision of ecosystem services (ES) by urban nature is considered part of a high-quality living environment (Tzoulas et al. 2007), while access to recreational services is important for public health (e.g. de Vries et al. 2003; Korpela and Ylén 2007). Thus, by identifying and assessing those benefits (ecosystem services), local policy makers can provide motivation for the establishment of protected areas beyond conservation – that of enhancing local human well-being.

ES have been defined differently by many authors (Boyd and Banzhaf 2007; Fisher and Turner 2008; Fisher et al. 2009; Seppelt et al. 2011, Burkhard and Maes 2017), with a number of classification frameworks proposed over the years (MA 2005; Haines-Young and Potschin 2013). In addition, there has been significant progress in the development of methods on ES quantification and mapping (Chan et al. 2006; Naidoo et al. 2008; Egoh et al. 2009; Eigenbrod et al. 2010; Vihervaara et al. 2010). However, most of the approaches developed for ES quantification use model-based proxies (Schulp et al. 2014) relying heavily on land cover-based assessments (Burkhard et al. 2009; 2012; Kandziora et al. 2013) in the absence of direct monitoring data on ES, and often produce maps that are too coarse in resolution to be useful at the local scale.

PA management is practised at the site-scale and thus requires practical inexpensive tools that can provide baseline information for biodiversity and ES assessment and monitoring. Although lately there has been a proliferation of ES assessment tools , site-based assessments, which are more useful to managers and practitioners, usually rely on theoretical scenarios or extrapolations from global models or require much greater technical skill and resources and are designed more for the academic user (Peh et al. 2013). As a result real site-scale approaches to ES assessment remain limited since the ES are often technically difficult and expensive to measure at that scale. The aim of this paper was to evaluate ES in a peri-urban national park in Cyprus and test the applicability of two widely used approaches namely:

a) the Toolkit for Ecosystem Service Site-based Assessment (TESSA) (Peh et al. 2013) and b) the ‘ES matrix’ approach (Burkhard et al. 2009) to map the potential/capacity of habitat types within the park. The specific objectives were to identify and assesse key ecosystem services provided by the park, map their spatial distributions and provide nature conservation authorities with a rapid methodology which can be applied in site-based ES assessments on the island.

The most important habitat types at the site and their current extent are given in Table 1. According to the Rapid Appraisal analysis the most important ecosystem services delivered by the study area refer to Aesthetic benefits/inspiration, Recreation/tourism, Biodiversity, Global climate regulation, and Environmental education. Aesthetic benefits/inspiration and Recreation/tourism are included in the broad category of Nature-based recreation and Global climate regulation referred mainly to the Carbon related services.

Mapping ecosystem services

In terms of supporting ES we identified that plantations, despite considered of low biodiversity value, (Needle-leaf Plantation, Temperate scrub/woodland) have the highest capacity (compared to the natural and semi-natural habitats of the site) to provide ES, particularly in places with priority habitat types to their understory. Mapping regulating services capacity corroborated the importance of plantations compared to other habitat types due to the dominant life-form. Apart from roads, habitats comprising exclusively synanthropic vegetation communities scored low in general, except for the cases that these occur in mixture with the Ziziphus lotus habitat type (higher score). In addition, the conifer plantations of RNFP were perceived more important for recreation in a peri-urban setting; hence, scored higher at the cultural services compared to other habitat types (Fig. 2). When the sum for all groups of services was calculated, the results demonstrated that some plantations within the RNFP attained the highest value in places where their understory comprises one or more of the habitat types 1520*, 6220* and 5420.

Figure 2.

Capacity of habitat types in the study area to deliver ES (based on ES matrix approach described in the text).

This is the first study of a complete site-based ES assessment in a protected area setting in Cyprus and as such, it has the potential to support environmental management and policy. The results corroborated the importance of RNFP for ES provision, in addition to biodiversity support, with direct and indirect benefits to the local community. Among the most important findings of this study are the results on recreation as a service in the study area, since it is higher than ever recorded in the past with annual visits (TANV) reaching a total number of 14471, with most of them during days off work in the period November to February. Recreation activities in the study area are less associated with nature-based activities like wildlife and forest appreciation. Only 21% of the respondents gave as main reason of their visit the appreciation of nature.

High visitor numbers may result in conflict between nature conservation and recreation in peri-urban parks (Borgstrom 2008; Sterl et al. 2008; Wagner et al. 2005; Zaikanov and Kiseleva 2008). Recreational services have economic importance (Tyrväinen and Miettinen 2000) while they are also important for tourism, as nature-related activities often influence the decisions of foreign tourists to travel to Cyprus. Protected areas, if properly managed, can provide, among other benefits, a source of income to local communities. In the case of RNFP visitors live and work locally, therefore contribute relatively small amounts to the local economy while there are no extra facilities on site where money could be spent on. Within a peri-urban park, green areas and tree plantations can function as carbon sinks (McHale et al. 2007), although urban vegetation only sequestrates a small part of annual CO₂ emissions of a city (Jansson and Nohrstedt 2001; Lebel et al. 2007). In fact, urban parks can function as carbon sources because management and the use of parks produce multiple amounts of CO₂ emissions compared to the carbon sequestration capacity of a green area (Oliver-Sola et al. 2007). Although urban carbon sinks, do not necessarily have a significant impact on the global carbon balance, urban green areas can have local importance as carbon sinks.

In the study area, apart from the Mediterranean grass-dominated habitat (6220*), the above-ground carbon stock measurements did not show variability. On the other hand, the highest below-ground carbon biomass was estimated in the Mediterranean scrub habitats (5220* and 5420). The lack of tabulated data for scrubs or broadleaf evergreen woodland was the main limitation for the implementation of the TESSA approach, which led to the underestimation of litter and dead organic material carbon stocks for all habitat types, except the Needle-leaf plantation. Another underestimation refers to the contribution of the extensive root systems, particularly in the cases of known phreatophytes like Ziziphus lotus (Gorai et al. 2010). Despite this limitation, in the absence of resources for extensive fieldwork, TESSA provides a consistent, inexpensive, rapid tool for ecosystem services appraisal at local level, which can be easily applied by practitioners and understood by stakeholders (Peh et al. 2014; Blaen et al. 2015). The tool becomes even more valuable in protected areas, including Natura 2000 sites, where often restrictions apply for land use and conservation management, which might influence the provision of services.

The second part of this assessment included an expert-based evaluation and mapping of the capacity of various habitat types to support a range of services which is now widely accepted in ES science (Jacobs et al. 2015), despite its reported challenges (Burkhard et al. 2009; 2012; Eigenbrod et al. 2010). Although, Rizoelia NFP is a biodiversity hotspot hosting three priority habitat types of European importance, the study highlighted that plantations in the area, despite their low biodiversity value, are equally important in terms of their capacity for ecosystem services supply. Therefore, in addition to biodiversity conservation, competent authorities should also manage the area in the future in a way that maximizes the provision of these services. This is now facilitated by the present first evaluation of the area’s potential, and the explicit spatial nature of the approach for visualizing the extent of services in the park (Tallis and Polasky 2009). What is equally important in terms of management is shifting from solely biodiversity delivery to ES delivery and the need to identify trade-offs between ES. The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services is a complex one (Mace et al. 2012) and has sparked a debate among conservationists on whether management interventions can achieve both ES and biodiversity related targets (see Reyes et al. 2012). In order to quantify the complex inter-relations between ecosystem services, drivers and pressures there is a need to take into account these different components and identify trade-offs (Haines-Young and Potschin 2007; Haines-Young et al. 2012; Haines-Young 2012; Sharp et al. 2016). The ES matrix approach is an evolving one and since it is quite general, there is a lot of scope for improvement. However, this rapid expert driven approach is a good early indication of what it can be supported by the park in terms of ecosystem services, their general patterns and how they can be assessed given more time and resources. It is interesting to note that the mapping results for carbon sequestration using TESSA, corroborates experts-based assessment; the latter aiming at assessing the magnitude of provision/capacity and therefore the importance of certain habitat types (like plantations) for regulating and maintenance services delivery in the study area, was carried out independently.

The study demonstrated the importance of site-based assessment for ecosystem services delivered in protected areas, pointing out a gap at the national level for a rigorous approach in such assessments in parallel to other national studies at the European level and in accordance with the obligations of Cyprus under the EU biodiversity strategy for 2020. These types of assessments are precursors to economic valuation of ecosystems services and the identification of their direct financial benefits to the local communities (Defra 2007, TEEB 2010, UK-NEA 2011).

The study was funded by the LIFE+ program of the European Union as part of the project entitled ‘Improving the conservation status of the priority habitat types *1520 and *5220 at the Rizoelia National Forest Park’ (LIFE12 NAT/CY/000758). We would like to thank the project’s Scientific Committee and Stakeholder Committee for the valuable assistance during this study. We would also like to thank Vassilis Trigkas, Louise Sutherland, Yannakis Zavou, Kyriaki Panteli, for their help in data collection.