Mountain areas have a substantial impact on climate dynamics and are one of the most critical water sources. Mountains were key in human evolution throughout history and supplied essential biotic and abi-otic ecosystem services (ES), key for human living. This perspective article will study the importance of moun-tains to ES supply and the impacts of the different drivers of change, namely habitat change, climate change, overexploitation, pollution, and invasive species. Mountain areas have a high capacity to supply an important number of regulating (global and local climate regulation, air quality regulation, natural hazards regulation, pollination), provisioning (crops, livestock, wild food and fish, biomass for energy and timber, freshwater re-newable energy – hydropower, wind, solar and geothermal – and mineral resources) and cultural (recreation and tourism, landscape aesthetics and inspiration, cultural heritage and cultural diversity and knowledge systems). However, changes imposed by habitat change, climate change, overexploitation, pollution, and invasive species can increase the tradeoffs between ES and trigger environmental degradation. Overall, there is a need to balance mountain ES exploitation and reduce the effects of the different drivers of change.

AcknowledgmentsThis work was developed within the Lithuanian Natio-nal Ecosystem Services Assessment and Mapping (LINE-SAM), which has received funding from European Social Fund project LINESAM no. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-01-0104 under a grant agreement with the Research Council of Li-thuania (LMTLT). Further, we would like to express gra-titude to Marius Kalinauskas for providing the photo used in the figure 1.

Peer reviewed