Regulation and Maintenance Ecosystem Services (ReMES): A Spatial Assessment in the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy)

The current spatial planning system in Italy demonstrates its lack of a data infrastructure so robust, flexible and adaptive to provide adequate performance in the capacity to support the decision-making process. This weakness is manifested even more in the management of the territorial transformations under the pressure of rapid changes involving social, environmental and economic dimensions. The ecosystem services (ES) approach constitutes a robust framework to contribute to the renewal of the planning system by making explicit complex dynamics until now considered only marginally and by introducing spatially explicit knowledge as an effective decision support system (DSS). This work focuses on the class of Regulating and Maintaining Ecosystem Services (ReMES) as it is considered particularly relevant with respect to the ecosystems’ potential of expressing environmental performance and contributing to human well-being. A further characteristic of this class is the often significant mismatch between the spatial scale of the territorial transformations and the (larger) scale at which changes in ES supply are measured. The aim of this work is therefore to represent the spatial distribution of a relevant set of ES in the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy) thus contributing to the development of a cross-sectoral spatial knowledge infrastructure with respect to components still managed within the planning processes in a sectoral and fragmented way. The results highlight the usefulness of such a tool for the comparison between different planning scenarios including both environmental conservation issues and socio-economic development strategies.