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This study aims to analyze how changes in land use influenced the delivery of ecosystem services in Cezava, a South Moravian agricultural region in the Czech Republic, in the period of 1845-2010. An observation of this period covering more than 160 years made it possible to reflect on social forces driving processes of transformation in the country. To capture the landscape multifunctionality and to indicate the environmental quality of the area under study, seven services provided in parallel by arable land, forests, and bodies of water were studied. The quantification of ecosystem services is based primarily on the transfer of values from the existing literature and on chronicle reviews and map analysis. Because looking back to the more distant past is a challenge and reliable information resources are lacking, a simple scoring method defining the functional features of the ecosystems was applied in order to evaluate the change of qualitative characteristics of the observed ecosystems. Besides that, the findings of these integrated assessments were supported by an analysis performed using landscape metrics. A comparison of service provision over the decades revealed that regulating and cultural services were significantly reduced, while provisioning services increased due to the proliferation of arable land, land consolidation, and agricultural intensification. However, a trend of improvement in the delivery of ecosystem services was introduced after 1990. Despite several uncertainties, this study demonstrates that it is possible to analyze long-term land-use trends to generate more meaningful, spatially explicit information, which can form the basis for landscape planning and ecosystem management.

The European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 Coordination and Support Action ESMERALDA aimed at developing guidance and a flexible methodology for Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) to support the EU member states in the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy’s Target 2 Action 5. ESMERALDA’s key tasks included network creation, stakeholder engagement, enhancing ecosystem services mapping and assessment methods across various spatial scales and value domains, work in case studies and support of EU member states in MAES implementation. Thus ESMERALDA aimed at integrating various project outcomes around four major strands: i) Networking, ii) Policy, iii) Research and iv) Application. The objective was to provide guidance for integrated ecosystem service mapping and assessment that can be used for sustainable decision-making in policy, business, society, practice and science at EU, national and regional levels. This article presents the overall ESMERALDA approach of integrating the above-mentioned project components and outcomes and provides an overview of how the enhanced methods were applied and how they can be used to support MAES implementation in the EU member states. Experiences with implementing such a large pan-European Coordination and Support Action in the context of EU policy are discussed and recommendations for future actions are given.