Assessment of ecosystem services at the national level in Germany—Illustration of the concept and the development of indicators by way of the example wood provision

•Explanation of the “German framework” following MAES and CICES recommendations.•Priorisation of 21 ecosystem services classes to be handled.•Principles of the description of indicandum and indicator (template).•Illustration of the procedure by the example raw wood production.•Discussion of the indicator in relationship to sustainability and biodiversity. The EU Biodiversity Strategy stipulates in Target 2, Action 5 that the member states must map and assess the state of the ecosystems and their services and promote the integration into the reporting systems at the EU and national level by 2020. Therefore indicators for capturing and assessing ecosystem services (ES) are needed. In this paper we report for which ES class types currently ES indicators are being developed for Germany in the context of an ongoing research project. Additionally, we provide the indicator specifications, which are based on underlying framework concept. By way of the example of the provisioning service ‘raw wood production’ and the development of the main-indicator ‘annual wood accrual’ and six sub-indicators, we illustrate the concrete procedure, including discussion of results and target values. The indicators for the ES wood provision are not only suitable for an exemplary illustration of procedure, data selection and data basis in Germany. Furthermore, it shows that indicators for provisioning ES can eminently conflict with biodiversity and other ES.

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