A new publication by Michael Tost and colleagues estimates the costs of the reduction of ecosystem services due to metal mining`s global land use by analysing four key metal ores – bauxite (aluminium), copper, gold and iron. By doing so, it provides novel information from which biomes those metals are extracted. As a part of the FINEPRINT project, Stephan Lutter and Sebastian Luckeneder from the Institute for Ecological Economics contributed their know-how on global metal mining patterns as well as spatially explicit data on extraction activities.