Abstract
Abstract Climate and land‐use change are key drivers of environmental degradation in the Anthropocene, but too little is known about their interactive effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Long‐term data on biodiversity trends are currently lacking. Furthermore, previous ecological studies have rarely considered climate and land use in a joint design, did not achieve variable independence or lost statistical power by not covering the full range of environmental gradients. Here, we introduce a multi‐scale space‐for‐time study design to disentangle effects of climate and land use on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The site selection approach coupled extensive GIS‐based exploration (i.e. using a Geographic information system) and correlation heatmaps with a crossed and nested design covering regional, landscape and local scales. Its implementation in Bavaria (Germany) resulted in a set of study plots that maximise the potential range and independence of environmental variables at different spatial scales. Stratifying the state of Bavaria into five climate zones (reference period 1981–2010) and three prevailing land‐use types, that is, near‐natural, agriculture and urban, resulted in 60 study regions (5.8 × 5.8 km quadrants) covering a mean annual temperature gradient of 5.6–9.8°C and a spatial extent of ~310 × 310 km. Within these regions, we nested 180 study plots located in contrasting local land‐use types, that is, forests, grasslands, arable land or settlement (local climate gradient 4.5–10°C). This approach achieved low correlations between climate and land use (proportional cover) at the regional and landscape scale with |r ≤ 0.33| and |r ≤ 0.29| respectively. Furthermore, using correlation heatmaps for local plot selection reduced potentially confounding relationships between landscape composition and configuration for plots located in forests, arable land and settlements. The suggested design expands upon previous research in covering a significant range of environmental gradients and including a diversity of dominant land‐use types at different scales within different climatic contexts. It allows independent assessment of the relative contribution of multi‐scale climate and land use on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Understanding potential interdependencies among global change drivers is essential to develop effective restoration and mitigation strategies against biodiversity decline, especially in expectation of future climatic changes. Importantly, this study also provides a baseline for long‐term ecological monitoring programs.
Highlights
Human actions are threatening the interdependent yet fragile balance of the biosphere, with far-reaching consequences for the diversity of plants (Brummitt et al, 2015) and animals (Dirzo et al, 2014)
Within each of the 60 quadrants, we aimed to investigate the impact of local land use and interactive effects of landscape-scale land use on biodiversity and ecosystem services
Nested within our large-scale factorial design, the resulting 180 plots allowed us to assess the influence of local land use on biodiversity and ecosystem services, while minimising correlations between landscape composition and configuration and accounting for microclimatic and structural differences
Summary
Human actions are threatening the interdependent yet fragile balance of the biosphere, with far-reaching consequences for the diversity of plants (Brummitt et al, 2015) and animals (Dirzo et al, 2014). As biodiversity contributes a wealth of ecological services, cascading effects and reassembly of communities jeopardise human well-being and biosphere's resilience against current and future disturbance (Chaplin-Kramer et al, 2019; Mori et al, 2018). Many of the services, such as food provisioning, decomposition or maintenance of soil fertility, rely on biotic interactions potentially sensitive to global change. This is especially true for regulating services provided by the highly diverse class of insects: pollination and pest regulation, both shown to strongly affect food production (Dainese et al, 2019; Duffy et al, 2017). The full cross-taxon magnitude of declines and the relative contributions of man-made drivers remain poorly understood
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