Please cite this article in press as: Hainz-Renetzeder, C., et al., Assessing the potential supply of landscape services to support ecological restoration of degraded landscapes: A case study in the Austrian-Hungarian trans-boundary region of Lake Neusiedl. Ecol. Model. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2014.07.001 ARTICLE IN PRESS G Model ECOMOD-7250; No. of Pages 11 Ecological Modelling xxx (2014) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Modelling journa l h om epa ge: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolmodel Assessing the potential supply of landscape services to support ecological restoration of degraded landscapes: A case study in the Austrian-Hungarian trans-boundary region of Lake Neusiedl C. Hainz-Renetzeder * , A. Schneidergruber, M. Kuttner, T. Wrbka Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research, University of Vienna, Rennweg 14, A-1030 Vienna, Austria a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Ecosystem service Constructed vegetation types Leitbild a b s t r a c t The concept of ecosystem functions and services has increasingly gained attention in the scientific and political community in the last decade. Lot of work has been performed to assess the actual delivery of different services for society. Still, the reference of the landscape’s potential to supply these actual services has not been investigated satisfactory so far. We thus aimed at assess the potential supply of landscape services in the study area of Lake Neusiedl in Austria – a region of acknowledged diversity and environmental quality – and compared these to the actual ones. We did this by setting up a map of constructed vegetation type where physiographic site conditions were used to calculate potential land cover in the area in GIS. These constructed vegetation types were linked to landscape services within a capacity matrix giving a weight between 0 (no supply) and 5 (high supply) to which amount one type can provide each single service. The resulting map showed large differences in areal extent of the different vegetation types reflecting the different landscapes in the region such as the dominance of forest steppe in the terraced landscapes or the occurrence of halophytic vegetation only in the lake basin. The same is true for the different landscape services. Some services like ‘nursery’ and ‘raw materials’ were quite highly provided throughout the area with values between 2.12 and 4.84, whereas ‘genetic resources’ and ‘pollination’ were only little provided (all values <2). On the other hand, functions like ‘nutrient regulation’ or ‘refugium’ exhibited their large potential with values >4 in the study area. The aggregation of the services by averaging values to finally derive three main service groups gave the highest values always to habitat (values between 3.1 and 4.8), followed by regulation (2.5–4.2) and then provision (1.9–3.2). Comparing the potential with the actual service supply, nearly all landscapes in the study area resulted in higher potential than the actual service supply. We further discuss possibilities to use the potential supply as a leitbild where restoration projects might be settled in the study area even though more detailed local data will be needed to set these projects up. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The concept of ecosystem functions, goods and services (MA, 2005) is an approach widely debated at the moment to quantify and to value the benefits ecosystems and landscapes provide to society. As such it is also highly dynamic with many publications and insights in a rather short period (e.g. Boyd and Banzhaf, 2007; Burkhard et al., 2013; Costanza et al., 1997; Daily and Matson, 2008; De Groot et al., 2002; Hermann et al., 2014; Willemen et al., 2012). In * Corresponding author. Tel.: +43 1 4277 54382. E-mail addresses: christa.renetzeder@univie.ac.at (C. Hainz-Renetzeder), anna.schneidergruber@univie.ac.at (A. Schneidergruber), michael.kuttner@univie.ac.at (M. Kuttner), thomas.wrbka@univie.ac.at (T. Wrbka). particular, since the release of the Millennium Ecosystem Assess- ment report (MA) in 2005 it has gained increasing attention and importance in science and policy in respect of natural resource management decision making. On a global scale one of the most recognized publications is The Economics of Ecosystems and Bio- diversity TEEB (Kumar, 2010), while at national scale it is the United Kingdom National Ecosystem Assessment (Bateman et al., 2011). However, despite all such efforts in making the performance of ecosystems and landscapes popular, we are still far from a sustainable use of our natural capital. Instead we notice an increas- ing degradation of ecosystems and its natural assets worldwide (Heinberg, 2010). One most likely reason for this is the absence of ecosystem service values in environmental planning processes. Current approaches to integrate the concept into environmental planning seem to be insufficient in supporting decision processes http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2014.07.001 0304-3800/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.