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Riverine floods cause increasingly severe damages to human settlements and infrastructure. Ecosystems have a natural capacity to decrease both severity and frequency of floods. Natural flood regulation processes along freshwaters can be attributed to two different mechanisms: flood prevention that takes place in the whole catchment and flood mitigation once the water has accumulated in the stream. These flood regulating mechanisms are not consistently recognized in major ecosystem service (ES) classifications. For a balanced landscape management, it is important to assess the ES flood regulation so that it can account for the different processes at the relevant sites. We reviewed literature, classified them according to these mechanisms, and analysed the influencing ecosystem characteristics. For prevention, vegetation biomass and forest extent were predominant, while for mitigation, the available space for water was decisive. We add some aspects on assessing flood regulation as ES, and suggest also to include flood hazard into calculations.

Charting the long-term trends in European wheat and maize yields and harvested areas and the relation of yields to climatic and economic drivers, two profound spatial processes become apparent. One consequence of the relatively late modernization of Eastern Europe has been to shift the focus of grain production from West to East. The warming trend prevailing over the past decades in the summer and winter seasons has been accompanied by a South to North shift in the harvested areas. The combination of these two processes has meant that the north-eastern sector of the European grain chessboard has emerged as the main beneficiary. There, the relatively low sensitivity of cereals to climatic change plus high economic growth rates have been accompanied by the most dynamic increases in cereal yields on the continent. As a result, a modern version of the 3000 year-old grain distribution system of the Ancient World is being restored before our eyes. One noteworthy finding is that increasing January–March temperatures have had a significant positive impact on wheat yields from Northern to South-Eastern Europe, and this is, at least in part, compensating for the negative impact of summer warming.

Maintaining and, where possible, improving the ecological status of our water resources are of particular importance for the future. So, one of the main drivers of landscape design must be to protect our waters. In this study, we carried out an evaluation of four hydrologic ecosystem services (HES) in the Zala River catchment area, the largest tributary of Lake Balaton (more than half of the lake’s surface inflow comes from the Zala River), Hungary. The lake has great ecological, economic and social importance to the country. We used the cell-based InVEST model to quantify the spatial distribution of flood control, erosion control and nutrient retention ecosystem services for phosphorus and nitrogen; then, we carried out an aggregated evaluation. Thereby, we localized the hot spots of service delivery and tested the effect of focused land use changes in critical areas of low performance on the examined four HES. Forests proved to have the best aggregated result, while croplands near the stream network performed poorly. The modelled change in land use resulted in significant improvement on nutrient filtration and moderate to minimal but improving change for the other HES in most cases. The applied method is suitable as a supporting tool at the watershed level for decision-makers and landscape designers with the aim of protecting water bodies.

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