Abstract
Global changes impact the human-environment relationship, and, in particular, they affect the provision of ecosystem services. Mountain ecosystems provide a wide range of such services, but they are highly sensitive and vulnerable to change due to various human pressures and natural processes. We conducted a literature survey that focused on two main issues. The first was the identification of quantitative methods aimed at assessing the impact of land use changes in mountain regions and the related ecosystem services. The second was the analysis of the extent to which the outcomes of these assessments are useful and transferable to stakeholders. We selected papers through a keyword-driven search of the ISI Web of Knowledge and other international databases. The keywords used for the search were mountain land use change and ecosystem service. Quantitative approaches to ecosystem service assessment rely on suitable indicators, therefore land use/land cover can be used as an appropriate proxy. Landscape metrics are a powerful analytical tool; their use can increase the accuracy of assessments and facilitate the mitigation of specific phenomena, such as fragmentation or the reduction of core habitat areas. Mapping is essential: it is the basis for spatial analyzes and eases the interactions between stakeholders. Land use/land cover change is a temporal process, so both past and future approaches are meaningful. It is necessary to enhance information transfer from theory to practice. Increasing stakeholder awareness can lead to suitable management solutions, and, reciprocally, stakeholder feedback can help improve current assessment methodologies and contribute to developing new tools that are suitable for specific problems.
Highlights
Mountain ecosystems offer a variety of important goods and services for humans
The conclusions are influenced by the selection of research articles, which is limited to the international databases, some important national and regional perspectives related to mountain land uses and ecosystem services are lacking in this paper
The journals focused on subjects classified as belonging to ecology and the environmental sciences contain the greatest number of papers that present research on specific types of ecosystem services, the four major categories of ecosystem services and ecosystem services in general (69%)
Summary
Mountain ecosystems offer a variety of important goods and services for humans. At the same time, there is a wide consensus that they are highly susceptible to severe impacts on biodiversity and human well-being under the influence of climate and land use changes [1,2,3,4]. The first was considered to be a common driver of landscape dynamics [33,34], whereas the second originated to capture the relationship between ecosystem functions and their economic value [35,36,37,38,39,40] These two concepts have only recently been considered as a joint approach for assessing the impacts and consequences of land use/land cover changes on ecosystem services [41], pointing to the need to discuss more cross-cutting perspectives [27,35,42,43,44,45,46,47]. Complex patterns of land use changes [78] stand out as one of the main pressures on ecosystem services, such as the effects of deforestation on greenhouse gas emissions, and could have permanent effects on ecosystems and the supply of ecosystem services, like in the case of insufficiently planned development [79]
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