Shifting priorities for ecosystem services under land use change

Policy objectives to maintain current and future supply of ecosystem services (ESs) are increasingly set. Methods to identify priority areas for ESs can assist in the implementation of such policy objectives. While land use change is an important driver of changes in ESs over time, most prioritization studies do not account for land use change or only assess negative effects. We assessed the effect of land use change on ESs in Europe for a 40-year period (2000 and 2040) and the subsequent consequences for identifying priority areas.
We quantified five services (carbon sequestration, erosion control, flood regulation, pollination and nature based tourism) under current and two future land use scenarios, partly based on previous work (Stürck et al., 2015). The scenarios account for both changes in land cover and land management intensity. Scenarios for future land use change followed the IPCC SRES storylines (A1, A2, B1 and B2). We used the two most diverging scenarios in terms of dynamics of agricultural area, namely A1 (high agricultural abandonment) and B2 (relatively low agricultural abandonment). Future land use projections were derived from Dyna-CLUE model simulations (Verburg and Overmars, 2009). The Dyna-CLUE model combines top-down and bottom-up drivers to allocate land use change.
For both time frames all sites were ranked based on their service provision using Zonation(Lehtomäki and Moilanen, 2013). To assess the sensitivity of the prioritization to land use change we compared the location of priority areas and the level of ESs within priority areas in the two time frames.
Land use change shifts the location of top priority areas. Overlapping priority areas over time range from 34.8% for the top 1% priority areas to 75.4% overlap for the top 25% priority areas. Current priority areas are mainly threatened by increased wood extraction in forests whereas newly established priority areas are in locations with land abandonment and forest succession. Over time only pollination and carbon sequestration are decreasing in the top ranked priority locations, whereas erosion control and flood regulation remain stable (fig. 1). Nature based tourism was positively affected by land use change.
Shifts in priority areas are driven not only by local land use change, but also by land use change in the wider landscape, through connectivity effects and shifts in the relative importance of sites. The real management challenge lies in maintaining ESs within those landscapes where production and conservation objectives need to be reconciled and priority areas are affected by both local and landscape wide changes in land use. We show the local positive and negative effects of land use change on ES priorities indicating that prioritization studies should not solely incorporate negative effects of land use change.