Flow of Ecosystem Services
The ecosystem service flow means the amount of ES that are actually mobilised in a specific area and time. It includes a dynamic temporal dimension and conceptually links ES supply with demand (Potschin & Burkhard 2015) 1). Other authors describe ES flow as de facto used ES or sets (bundles) of ES and other outputs from natural systems in a particular area within a given time period (Burkhard et al. 2014; Albert et al. 2015) 2) 3). The OpenNESS project defines ES flow as the rate at which ecosystem services are supplied to some beneficiary (Potschin et al. 2016) 4). Flow indicators refer to de facto used ES that are changing over time and represent the utilized ecosystem services (Albert et al. 2015) 5).
In AlpES the ecosystem service flow describes the de facto used ecosystem services or sets/bundles of ecosystem services and other outputs from natural systems in a particular area within a given time period. The definition is mainly in line with Albert et al. (2015) 6).