Dataset Information

Future impacts of changing land-use and climate on ecosystem services of mountain grassland and their resilience.

ABSTRACT: Although the ecosystem services provided by mountain grasslands have been demonstrated to be highly vulnerable to environmental and management changes in the past, it remains unclear how they will be affected in the face of a combination of further land-use/cover changes and accelerating climate change. Moreover, the resilience of ecosystem services has not been sufficiently analysed under future scenarios. This study aimed to assess future impacts on multiple mountain grassland ecosystem services and their resilience. For a study area in the Central Alps (Stubai Valley, Austria), six ecosystem services were quantified using plant trait-based models for current and future conditions (in 2050 and 2100) considering three socio-economic scenarios. Under all scenarios, the greatest changes in ecosystem services were related to the natural reforestation of abandoned grassland, causing a shift from grassland to forest services. Although the high resilience potential of most ecosystem services will be maintained in the future, climate change seems to have negative impacts, especially on the resilience of forage production. Thus, decision makers and farmers will be faced with the higher vulnerability of ecosystem services of mountain grassland. Future policies should consider both socio-economic and environmental dynamics to manage valuable ecosystem services.

SUBMITTER: Schirpke U

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6525093 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Future impacts of changing land-use and climate on ecosystem services of mountain grassland and their resilience.

Schirpke Uta U Kohler Marina M Leitinger Georg G Fontana Veronika V Tasser Erich E Tappeiner Ulrike U

Ecosystem services 20170626 Pt A

Although the ecosystem services provided by mountain grasslands have been demonstrated to be highly vulnerable to environmental and management changes in the past, it remains unclear how they will be affected in the face of a combination of further land-use/cover changes and accelerating climate change. Moreover, the resilience of ecosystem services has not been sufficiently analysed under future scenarios. This study aimed to assess future impacts on multiple mountain grassland ecosystem servic ...[more]

PMID: 31110934

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Project description:BackgroundThe páramos, the high-elevation ecosystems of the northern Andes, are well-known for their high species richness and provide a variety of ecosystem services to local subsistence-based communities and regional urbanizations. Climate change is expected to negatively affect the provision of these services, but the level of this impact is still unclear. Here we assess future climate change impact on the ecosystem services provided by the critically important páramos of the department of Boyacá in Colombia, of which over 25% of its territory is páramo.MethodsWe first performed an extensive literature review to identify useful species of Boyacá, and selected 103 key plant species that, based on their uses, support the provision of ecosystem services in the páramos. We collated occurrence information for each key species and using a Mahalanobis distance approach we applied climate niche modelling for current and future conditions.ResultsWe show an overall tendency of reduction in area for all ecosystem services under future climate conditions (mostly a loss of 10% but reaching up to a loss of 40%), but we observe also increases, and responses differ in intensity loss. Services such as Food for animals, Material and Medicinal, show a high range of changes that includes both positive and negative outcomes, while for Food for humans the responses are mostly substantially negative. Responses are less extreme than those projected for individual species but are often complex because a given ecosystem service is provided by several species. As the level of functional or ecological redundancy between species is not yet known, there is an urgency to expand our knowledge on páramos ecosystem services for more species. Our results are crucial for decision-makers, social and conservation organizations to support sustainable strategies to monitor and mitigate the potential consequences of climate change for human livelihoods in mountainous settings.

Project description:Meeting the world's growing energy demand through bioenergy production involves extensive land-use change which could have severe environmental and social impacts. Second generation bioenergy feedstocks offer a possible solution to this problem. They have the potential to reduce land-use conflicts between food and bioenergy production as they can be grown on low quality land not suitable for food production. However, a comprehensive impact assessment that considers multiple ecosystem services (ESS) and biodiversity is needed to identify the environmentally best feedstock option, as trade-offs are inherent. In this study, we simulate the spatial distribution of short rotation coppices (SRCs) in the landscape of the Mulde watershed in Central Germany by modeling profit-maximizing farmers under different economic and policy-driven scenarios using a spatially explicit economic simulation model. This allows to derive general insights and a mechanistic understanding of regional-scale impacts on multiple ESS in the absence of large-scale implementation. The modeled distribution of SRCs, required to meet the regional demand of combined heat and power (CHP) plants for solid biomass, had little or no effect on the provided ESS. In the policy-driven scenario, placing SRCs on low or high quality soils to provide ecological focus areas, as required within the Common Agricultural Policy in the EU, had little effect on ESS. Only a substantial increase in the SRC production area, beyond the regional demand of CHP plants, had a relevant effect, namely a negative impact on food production as well as a positive impact on biodiversity and regulating ESS. Beneficial impacts occurred for single ESS. However, the number of sites with balanced ESS supply hardly increased due to larger shares of SRCs in the landscape. Regression analyses showed that the occurrence of sites with balanced ESS supply was more strongly driven by biophysical factors than by the SRC share in the landscape. This indicates that SRCs negligibly affect trade-offs between individual ESS. Coupling spatially explicit economic simulation models with environmental and ESS assessment models can contribute to a comprehensive impact assessment of bioenergy feedstocks that have not yet been planted.

Dataset Information

Future impacts of changing land-use and climate on ecosystem services of mountain grassland and their resilience.

Publications

Future impacts of changing land-use and climate on ecosystem services of mountain grassland and their resilience.

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