A tool for screening groundwater ecosystem services at Swedish drinking-water sources

Magazine article, 2026

Groundwater protection enjoys broad public support, yet implementation is often constrained by competing land uses and the need to justify trade-offs transparently. Ecosystem services offer a useful framework for structuring these discussions, but systematic screening is still uncommon because relevant information is dispersed across sources and time-consuming to compile. This paper presents a practitioner-oriented screening tool that automates the retrieval and processing of open national geodata for any user-defined area in Sweden and uses the results to pre-populate a groundwater ecosystem services assessment. Users define an area of interest by drawing on an interactive map or by uploading a boundary file. The tool produces an Excel output that summarises provisioning, regulating, and cultural services associated with the selected area, and exports GeoPackage layers for follow-up analysis and communication. Services that cannot be inferred from open data are completed through a brief guided questionnaire. The result is a repeatable screening workflow that can be completed in about 15 minutes.