Comparative study on biophysical ecosystem service mapping methods-a test case of carbon stocks in Finnish Forest Lapland

Mapping of ecosystem services in biophysical environment helps distinguishing the nature's benefits in our surroundings. Ecosystem services also enable assessing the level of sustainability of the use of the environment. Various methods are being used for mapping them and methods: vary from expert evaluations to complex modelling. All methods: are related with uncertainties and affect to their applicability for different purposes. In this study, two different level biophysical mapping based datasets were tested; 1) data combination of biophysical polygon GIS data (SutiGIS) and statistics, and 2) modelled data of National Forest Inventory were evaluated to compare the differences between the methods: for carbon storages. Our results show that there are differences between results that have been produced in different levels of complexity. However, we also discovered that simpler datasets can also help detecting the shortcomings that may occur in modelling. We discuss also the potential applications of the used datasets in terms of providing information on biodiversity in ES assessments.