COSTS OF UNCOORDINATED SITE SELECTION WITH MULTIPLE ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

Models to spatially optimize land use measures for achieving multiple ecosystem service and biodiversity goals typically assume that a single actor optimizes land use measures to achieve the different goals. However, in reality public administrations are frequently divided into different units, each of which has its own budget and is responsible for one specific ecosystem service or biodiversity conservation target. Frequently these administrative units do not cooperate, even if they are implementing similar land use measures to achieve their respective goal. This lack of coordination may lead to cost-effectiveness losses in comparison to a coordinated optimization strategy where the weighted conservation and ecosystem service goals are maximized for the total budget available to all administrative units. Considering the problem of selecting land patches for ecosystem service preservation, this paper analyzes with a conceptual model how cost-effectiveness losses of the uncoordinated strategy in comparison to the coordinated strategy depend on changes in selected parameters (budget, mean and standard deviation of ecosystem services, correlation of ecosystem services on patches and weighting of different ecosystem services) that determine the ecological and socio-economic context of the decision situation.