ORIGINAL ARTICLE Spatio-temporal change of ecosystem services as a key to understand natural resource utilization in Southern Chile Karla E. Locher-Krause 1 & Sven Lautenbach 1,2 & Martin Volk 1 Received: 26 October 2016 /Accepted: 23 May 2017 /Published online: 10 July 2017 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017 Abstract The understanding of how ecosystem services are distributed across the landscape and their change over time provides key information to manage multi-functional land- scapes. To balance the conflicting demands on land multi- scale assessments are highly relevant, especially in biodiver- sity hot spot areas as the Valdivian temperate rain forest. We quantified six ecosystem services linked to forest ecosystems over six temporal periods (1985–2011): three regulating (car- bon storage, sediment retention, phosphorous retention), one provisioning (plantation site productivity), and two cultural services (landscape aesthetics, forest recreation). The study area is divided in four geomorphological units (Coastal Mountain Range, Central Valley, Pre-Andean and Andes mountain range). Our results show a high spatial and temporal variability of ecosystem service supply in these units. We ob- served a strong increase of plantation production (Coastal Range and Central Valley) as well as of forest recreation ser- vices over time (Coastal and Andes ranges); remaining service trends varied across units and time. Recommendations for landscape management are (i) an increase of buffer strips to reduce diffuse emissions into the river network and to enhance ecological connectivity, (ii) an increase of protected areas in the Central Valley, and (iii) a rethinking of the role of exotic forest plantations. Keywords Landscape multi-functionality . Spatio-temporal analysis . Mapping of ecosystem services . Deforestation . Exotic forest plantations . Land use change . South America Introduction Land use change and especially deforestation decrease the ability of many ecosystems to supply services, which are the base to support human needs and well-being (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Díaz et al. 2006; Bennett et al. 2009). The high pressure of natural resource utilization has led to important changes in ecosystem functions and processes at different scales (Costanza et al. 1997; Foley et al. 2011; Ellis et al. 2013). As many ecosystem services may rely on the same ecosystem process, external factors might affect several ecosystem services at the same time (Bennett et al. 2009; Mouchet et al. 2015). Hence, mapping and monitoring eco- system service dynamics at different scales plays an important role in landscape management and spatial planning, since it aggregates complex information about the effect of ecosystem service utilization on the supply of the services (Schröter et al. 2014; Dallimer et al. 2015; Renard et al. 2015). Several stud- ies have shown that an expansion of the temporal and spatial extent and of the resolution of ecosystem services assessment allows a better representation of the heterogeneity in ecosys- tem service supply (Rodríguez et al. 2006; Lautenbach et al. 2011 ; Syrbe and Walz 2012 ; Birkhofer et al. 2015 ). Furthermore, it delivers information about the magnitude and recurrence interval at which ecosystem service supply changes over time which is crucial for landscape planning, Editor:Nicolas Dendoncker. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10113-017-1180-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Karla E. Locher-Krause karlalocher@gmail.com 1 Department of Computational Landscape Ecology, UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany 2 Land Use Modeling and Ecosystem Services, Agricultural Faculty, University Bonn, Nußallee 1, 53115 Bonn, Germany Reg Environ Change (2017) 17:2477–2493 DOI 10.1007/s10113-017-1180-y