Introduction

Work on the Finnish ecosystem service indicators begun at the Finnish Environment Institute in 2013. The aim of the work has been to concretize the concept of ecosystem services from a national perspective and to provide a list of the most important ecosystem services in Finland.

At the moment, there are 10 provisioning services, 12 regulating services and 6 cultural services in the collection. These are based on the International Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) and have been selected by multi-sectoral expert groups after initial editing by the working group at the Finnish Environment Institute.

On each ecosystem service we have provided four indicators based on the Cascade model: on the ecosystem structure (1) and functioning (2) that is crucial for the provisioning of the service as well as the benefit (3) that we humans derive from the service and its value (4) to us.

Work on measuring and monitoring ecosystem services is far from complete. Partly this is because of the vastness of the subject, partly because of scattered and slowly developing information sources. In many cases, we cannot provide the exact quantitative monitoring data that we would wish to. In these cases we have described the phenomenon qualitatively.

Especially as this is a work-in-progress indicator collection, all feedback is most welcome.

Enjoy your stay at the Finnish ecosystem indicator collection at Biodiversity.fi!