Abstract

Mapping of ecosystem services (ESs) provide valuable information on the geographical variation of ESs and their relation to overall diversity. Although the relationship between biodiversity and ESs has been intensively explored, little is known how geodiversity (i.e., variety of geological, geomorphological and soil features) is associated with different ESs. We studied 1) the spatial variation of geodiversity and biodiversity in relation to six ESs (i.e., forest carbon budget, potential supply of groundwater, milk and meat production, crop production, amount of free-time residences and nationally valuable landscapes) using variation partitioning (VP), and 2) the spatial overlap between geodiversity and biodiversity and ESs using generalized additive models (GAM) in 1006 intensively surveyed grid cells of 100 km² located across Finland. In the VP, biodiversity independently explained more of the variation than geodiversity for majority of the ESs. However, shared explanation ability of biodiversity and geodiversity was considerable for majority of ESs (forest carbon budget: 41.3%, crop production: 15.0%, free-time residences: 15.2% and valuable landscapes: 7.3%), often exceeding that of both independent contributions. GAMs indicated that increase in both biodiversity and geodiversity enhances forest carbon budget (D2 = 66.8% and 12.4%, respectively), potential production of groundwater (8.3% and 0.1%), crop production (35.7% and 8.9%), free-time residences (40.0% and 7.9%) and valuable landscapes (11.6% and 6.9%). However, the positive relationship between diversity and ESs levelled off for many of the ESs. Our findings suggest that geodiversity is an important complementing factor in explaining spatial variation of the ESs in high-latitude regions. We also found dominantly synergic effects between abiotic diversity and ESs. Thus, our study results highlight the need to more deeply incorporate abiotic diversity into ESs research. Environmental conservation and management would benefit from the more comprehensive integration of geodiversity to ESs research along with the changing environmental conditions of future decades.