Land is one of the most important and limited resources and provides a range of essential ecosystem services (ES) for human well-being (Fürst et al., 2013). However, increasing human demands for natural resources, cultivable lands, and a variety of ES along with intensive changes to biogeophysical structures and processes might negatively impact the development of societies (Mooney et al., 2009; Sonter et al., 2017). In this context, land management and policy decision-making are recognized as the most important drivers for these impacts and the subsequent losses in the ES supply at multiple scales (Schosser et al., 2010; Verburg et al., 2015). Spatial planning is a key instrument for decision-making in terms of coordinating human activities and their influences on land systems, and subsequently on the quality, quantity and spatial distribution of ES (Geneletti 2011, 2013; Mascarenhas et al., 2015). Including ES in spatial planning is considered to be a suitable approach for informing, communicating and facilitating consensus building among different actors because it provides a basis for multisectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration (Albert et al., 2014; Galler et al., 2016). An essential aspect in the integration of ES in spatial planning is the issue of scale and the multiple levels of decision-making involved. Supply and demand of ES, as well as their interrelations, vary from local to regional and global scales, which at the same time affect a wide range of stakeholders (Geijzendorffer and Roche, 2014; Hein et al., 2006). Thus, spatial planning has the potential to mainstream ES across multiple governance levels, since it provides an umbrella for coordinating different policy instruments in a more strategic manner (Greiber and Schiele, 2011). As discussed by Geneletti (2011) and Mascarenhas et al. (2014), the integration of ES into spatial planning should consider existing instruments, such as strategic environmental assessment (SEA).