Ecosystem Services in Land-Use Planning: An Application for Assessing Transformation Scenarios at the Local Scale

In the last twenty years, the debate over ecosystem services (ES) has inten-sively increased thanks to the growing awareness of the relevance of ecolog-ical and environmental problems. Initiatives like the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment or The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity have brought the ES concept into the international policy agenda, in turn stimulating the re-search. As a result, many applications have led to a very strong advance in the ecological and biophysical analysis of ES. However, in the context of land-use changes and transformation planning, the implications of ES have been only partially explored. Starting from a real case study, the present pa-per shows a tentative to bridge the gap between ES evaluation and transfor-mation planning. The free software called Simulsoil is considered in the study to quantify, at the same time, biophysical and economic values of eight ES. Apart from the specific results of the simulation, the application shows the role of these analyses to support the decision-making process and the definition of alternative scenarios. In particular, the results can support the concertation between public administrations and developers in the defini-tion of shared actions or, eventually, the identification of compensation measures.