Variation in ecosystem services within a particular land cover type (uniformity error) alone led to a poor fit to primary data for most services; sampling effects (sampling error) and extrapolating from a small region to a larger area (regionalization error) led to substantial, but highly variable, additional reductions in the fit to primary data.
The article also shows that combining multiple ecosystem services into a single layer is likely to be even more problematic as it contains the errors in each of the constituent layers. These errors are sufficiently large to undermine decisions that might be based on such extrapolated maps. Greatly improved mapping of the actual distributions of ecosystem services is therefore needed to achieve the goal of conserving these vital assets.
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