Choosing Indicators for a "Climate-Friendly" Landscape – Regulating Ecosystem Services
Criterion C4: The landscape provides locally, regionally, and globally important ecosystem services that contribute to the mitigation of climate change.
The ecosystem services that a climate-friendly landscape is desired to perform are global climate regulation and local climate regulation. Both are regulating services, the regulation of the local climate also contributes to increase the resilience of the system to disturbances caused by global changes in climate.
Click on the links to see means of measure.
Indicators of Global Climate Regulation
| Indicator | Measurement Unit | Means of Measure |
| Carbon Sequestration (in vegetation, crops and soils) | Tonnes of Carbon per hectare and per year | Carbon Sequestration |
| GHG emissions derived from land use (metane, nitrous dioxide, carbon dioxide) | Depends on the sources of the emissions, and the unit of area and time we want to refer the measures to. Examples of measurement units include mg CH4, μg N2O per m2 from crop fields; T CO2 per ha; kg CH4, N2O per head of livestock per acre. | IPCC Guidelines for National GHG Inventories (vol. 4: AFOLU Sector) |
Indicators of Local Climate Regulation
| Indicator | Measurement Unit | Means of Measure |
| Vegetation cover and structure | Area (ha or acres) of vegetation cover, Percentage of vegetation cover within the landscape.
Number of trees per unit of area (tree density), abundance of perennials, average tree height, analysis of vertical structure of vegetation cover. |
Land pattern analysis |
| Watershed Health | Measures of Water Quality | Infiltration capacity |
| Precipitation | Inches or millimeters (mm) per unit of time | Precipitation Rate |
| Evapotranspiration | Millimiters (mm) per unit of time | Evapotranspiration Rate |
Continue to Indicators for a climate-friendly landscape: Criterion P3
Go back to Unit 4 for more information about how to select indicators.
Continue to Unit 5 Establishing a Baseline