RESEARCH ARTICLE How to integrate remotely sensed data and biodiversity for ecosystem assessments at landscape scale Petteri Vihervaara • Laura Mononen • Ari-Pekka Auvinen • Raimo Virkkala • Yihe Lu ¨ • Inka Pippuri • Petteri Packalen • Ruben Valbuena • Jari Valkama Received: 30 April 2014 / Accepted: 3 December 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract Context Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning underpins the delivery of all ecosystem services and should be accounted for in all decision-making related to the use of natural resources and areas. However, biodiversity and ecosystem services are often inade- quately accounted for in land use management decisions. Objective We studied a boreal forest ecosystem by linking citizen-science bird data with detailed infor- mation on forest characteristics from airborne laser scanning (ALS). In this paper, we describe this method, and evaluate how similar kinds of biological data sets combined with remote sensing can be used for ecosystem assessments at landscape scale. Methods We analysed data for 41 boreal forest bird species and for 14 structural ALS-based forest parameters. Results The results support the use of the selected method as a basis for quantifying spatially-explicit biodiversity indicators for ecosystem assessments, while suggestions for improvements are also reported. Finally, we evaluate the capacity of those indicators to describe biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships, for example with carbon trade-offs. The results showed clear distinctions between the different spe- cies as measured, for example, by above-ground forest biomass at the observation sites. We also assess how Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10980-014-0137-5) contains supple- mentary material, which is available to authorized users. P. Vihervaara (&) Á L. Mononen Á A.-P. Auvinen Á R. Virkkala Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Joensuu, Oulu, and Helsinki Offices, P.O. Box 140, 00251 Helsinki, Finland e-mail: petteri.vihervaara@ymparisto.fi L. Mononen Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, University of Eastern Finland (UEF), P.O. Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland Y. Lu ¨ State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-environmental Sciences (RCEES), Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 2871, Beijing 100085, China I. Pippuri Á P. Packalen Á R. Valbuena School of Forest Sciences, University of Eastern Finland (UEF), P.O. Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland J. Valkama Finnish Museum of Natural History (FMNH), Zoological Museum, Monitoring Centre, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 17, 00014 Helsinki, Finland 123 Landscape Ecol DOI 10.1007/s10980-014-0137-5