Abstract
Silvopastoral systems of the Swiss Jura Mountains serve as a traditional source of forage and timber in the subalpine vegetation belt, but their vulnerability to land use and climate change puts their future sustainability at stake. We coupled experimental and modeling approaches to assess the impact of climate change on the pasture-woodland landscape. We drew conclusions on the resistance potential of wooded pastures with different management intensities by sampling along a canopy cover gradient. This gradient spanned from unwooded pastures associated with intensive farming to densely wooded pastures associated with extensive farming. Transplanted mesocosms of these ecosystems placed at warmer and drier conditions provided experimental evidence that climate change reduced herbaceous biomass production in unwooded pastures but had no effect in sparsely wooded pastures, and even stimulated productivity in densely wooded pastures. Through modeling these results with a spatially explicit model of wooded pastures (WoodPaM) modified for the current application, results were extrapolated to the local landscape under two regionalized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for climate change. This led to the suggestion that within the Jura pasture-woodlands, forage production in the near future (2000-2050 AD) would be affected disproportionately throughout the landscape. A stable forage supply in hot, dry years would be provided only by extensive and moderate farming, which allows the development of an insulating tree cover within grazed pastures. We conclude that such structural landscape diversity would grant wood-pastures with a buffering potential in the face of climate change in the forthcoming decades.
Highlights
History and importance of pasture-woodlands Pasture-woodlands are a traditional human-made landscape in European mountains (Etienne 1996) and cover a major part of the Swiss Jura Mountains
aboveground biomass (AGB) decreased significantly along the land use intensity gradient in the order unwooded > sparsely wooded > densely wooded pastures (Fig. 3). These differences were most evident at the control site at 1350 meters above sea level (m ASL) but were weakened at warmer climate where AGB production was stimulated in densely wooded pastures, reduced in unwooded pastures, and remained unchanged in sparsely wooded pastures
The spin-up period ended around year 1980, and realistic utilization rates were simulated for extensive (EWP: ~70%), moderate (MWP: ~80%), and intense pastures (IWP: ~100%)
Summary
History and importance of pasture-woodlands Pasture-woodlands are a traditional human-made landscape in European mountains (Etienne 1996) and cover a major part of the Swiss Jura Mountains They consist of a mosaic of open grassland, closed forest, and semi-forested pastureland with scattered or clumped trees, and owe their shape to a long history of multifunctional land use, mainly pasturing and forestry (Buttler et al 2009). Pasture-woodlands vary substantially in the amount and quality of ecosystem services they provide Important factors such as forage supply are maintained higher through intensively managed treeless pastures than through extensive wood-pastures with free grazing livestock. The significance of this landscape for the tourist economy has been acknowledged, though it remains difficult to measure (Miéville-Ott and Barbezat 2005)
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