Ecosystem services mapping has been becoming one of the forefronts in the field of ecosystem services researches. Ecosystems deliver bunches of vital services for human society, such as food, water provision and water purification, carbon sequestration, soil protection, and entertainment. The sustainable capability of ecosystems to provide these services is influenced by changes of biophysical condition (e.g. The changes in land use and land cover, biodiversity, atmospheric composition and climate) and human society (e.g. The changes of socio-economic characteristics, demand and consumptive patterns of human beings), which alter the correlation of demand and supply in ecosystem services through impacting the composition, structure, and processes of ecosystems.
Ecosystem services mapping is a process that assesses the component, spatial distribution and mutual relationships of ecosystem services in specific spatial-temporal scales by using multiple mapping methods and multi-sources data. These series of spatially explicit maps not only reveal the quantitative characteristics of the current regional ecosystem service, but also exposit the potential changes caused by different environmental scenarios. These visualized mapping result can facilitate decision makers to integrate ecosystem services into environmental protection planning and implementing, and assist them to weigh the pros and cons of the possible environmental variable scenarios and the consequences of likely decisions, in addition, to make an informed decision which benefits the sustainable developmental of natural-human systems.
In the past few years, the widespread use of GIS and availability of the high spatial and temporal resolution RS data sets have prominently promoted the capability of ecosystem services mapping. After reviewing the researches published recently, we identified and summarized that ecosystem services mapping is primarily focusing on: (1) the mapping of ecosystem services supply which refers to the capacity of an given area to provide a specific bundle of ecosystem services within a particular time scale; (2) the mapping of ecosystem services demand which is the sum of all ecosystem services consumed by people in a particular area and specific time period; (3) and the mapping of the ecosystem services trade-offs and synergies, the former refers to the increment of one ecosystem service which is at the cost of the other ecosystem service, the latter means the synchronous variations among many different ecosystem services. Although there are lots of practical cases, ecosystem services mapping is still at its early stage. The core of ecosystem services mapping is a process about how to meet the needs of policy makers by using appropriate mapping methods, however, cautions must be mentioned in the broad use of mapping methods or models because they are scale-dependent and context-specific, and the mapping results need to be validated and verified against the observational data.