Linking long-term landscape dynamics to the multiple interactions among ecosystem services in the European Alps

Context

Human driven land-use and land-cover change (LULC) is considered to be among the greatest ecological pressures in mountain regions. Over the past century, across the European Alps, extensive LULC changes have been observed, affecting ecosystem goods and services (ESs).

Objectives

For eight case study sites across the Alpine arc we aimed to provide a spatiotemporal explicit assessment of the impacts of LULC dynamics on ES provision and interactions, including cultivated crops, plant material, climate regulation, soil erosion control and aesthetics.

Methods

We quantified ES provision in biophysical terms at four time periods (1850, 1955, 1985, 2005) using spatially explicit LULC based assessment models. ES interactions were identified by statistically analyzing the spatiotemporal pattern among ES capacities.

Results

Over the past century forested areas have increased mainly at the cost of grasslands, while on easily accessible sites and fertile valley floors agricultural intensification occurred. ES provision shifted between 1850 and 2005, from a predominance of production ESs in 1850 to a landscape characterized by regulating ESs in 2005. Spatiotemporal analyses of ES interactions revealed trade-offs between regulating and cultural ESs and within the provisioning ES bundle and allowed to derive three different ES trajectories: regions developing from single to multifunctional sites in terms of service provision, sites reducing their service capacities and sites with rather stationary patterns over broad time periods.

Conclusions

We demonstrated that ES capacities in complex agro-ecological mountain regions are highly sensitive to long-term landscape dynamics. We conclude that assessing ES capacities and interactions in an explicitly spatiotemporal manner can help to guide evidence-based environmental measures.