The relevance of ecological status to ecosystem functions and services in a large boreal lake

1. Environmental conventions aim to protect ecosystem structures and functions to provide goods and services for mankind. The degree of aquatic ecosystem naturalness, or ecological status as it is defined in the Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union, is notionally linked to supplies of ecosystem services. In practice these links have rarely been documented or even investigated and, to justify conservation and management objectives based on the status indicators, it is essential to demonstrate their relationships to ecosystem functions and services. 2. The WFD requires member states to classify their surface waters aiming to achieve good ecological status of water bodies. However, an implicit assumption of the WFD, that the ecosystem functions and services targeted to be protected and maintained are related to the measured status, remains uncertain. 3. Using a time-series dataset covering almost 50 years, we examined the development of ecological status of eight sub-basin...