Modelling and valuing ecosystem goods and services of multifunctional landscapes using GIS and remote sensing

Landscape change today is occurring more rapidly than in any other time in history. Among other influences such as global warming these changes are also driven by political decisions affecting ecosystem services. The overall research objective is to defi ne how the European Union’s political strategies implemented through rural development programmes and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are infl uencing or changing ecosystem goods and services in the future. This contribution aims at outlining the research framework and especially focuses on a ground rent approach to model the spatially explicit distribution of subsidy cash fl ows on farm and parcel level. Experiments with changing political strategies and incentive payments were carried out in the Mondsee catchment (Austria) using GIS and remote sensing for facilitation. The results were visualised and show the dominant (inter-)national and regional funding programmes of this area. They further display the likely effects of changing political strategies on the monetary value of certain parcels and the overall farmparcel balance. The validation of an aggregated set of funding measures reveals 15% deviation between the model framework and real subsidy payments. Thus, this model is suitable for estimating the impact of changed funding strategies at EU level and also supports farmers in indentifying the best economic income sources on parcel and farm level. Embedded in the overall research objective, the results constitute the basis for opening a discussion on how ecosystem services might change with political intervention strategies in rural areas and resulting landscape changes in the future.