Spatial Prioritization of Ecosystem Services for Land Conservation: The Case Study of Central Italy

Ecosystem services delivered by natural ecosystems are increasingly important for climatechange adaptation and mitigation and play a huge role in biodiversity conservation. For this reason,the EU has the ambitious goal of protecting at least 30% of land by 2030. Member states are called toimprove and expand the network of protected areas within the next few years; to do so, scientificstudies aimed at identifying areas with high ecological value, as well as at defining best managementpractices, are highly needed. In this study, we used the InVEST suite of models to spatially assessthree regulating ecosystem services, that is, carbon storage, seasonal water yield, and urban flood riskmitigation in three administrative regions of central Italy. Using overlay analysis, we found areas withthe highest delivery in each of the considered ESs; based on these findings, we eventually proposedfour new protected areas, which combine for 888 km2, that is, 2.73% of the study area. Interestingly,each of the newly proposed protected areas has somehow been discussed and hypothesized bystakeholders, but only one is presumably going to be part of the national network of protected areaswithin the next years. Hopefully, by prioritizing areas according to the production of ecosystemservices, this study can be intended as a step towards the systematic inclusion of ecosystem servicesstudies for enhancing the network of areas under national protection schemes and achieving the goalof protecting at least 30% of land in Europe by 2030