Abstract
Soil degradation has been associated with a lack of adequate consideration of soil ecosystem services. We demonstrate a broadly applicable method for mapping changes in the supply of two priority soil ecosystem services to support decisions about sustainable land-use configurations. We used a landscape-scale study area of 302 km2 in northern Victoria, south-eastern Australia, which has been cleared for intensive agriculture. Indicators representing priority soil services (soil carbon sequestration and soil water storage) were quantified and mapped under both a current and a future 25-year land-use scenario (the latter including a greater diversity of land uses and increased perennial crops and irrigation). We combined diverse methods, including soil analysis using mid-infrared spectroscopy, soil biophysical modelling, and geostatistical interpolation. Our analysis suggests that the future land-use scenario would increase the landscape-level supply of both services over 25 years. Soil organic carbon content and water storage to 30 cm depth were predicted to increase by about 11% and 22%, respectively. Our service maps revealed the locations of hotspots, as well as potential trade-offs in service supply under new land-use configurations. The study highlights the need to consider diverse land uses in sustainable management of soil services in changing agricultural landscapes.
Highlights
That soils are fundamental to a wide range of ecosystem services needs to be acknowledged to avoid further soil degradation and to identify sustainable land-use change
We demonstrated a broadly applicable approach for quantifying and mapping service indicators in an agricultural landscape in south-eastern Australia
We showed that under the future land-use plan, the supply of the two priority soil services would likely increase
Summary
That soils are fundamental to a wide range of ecosystem services needs to be acknowledged to avoid further soil degradation and to identify sustainable land-use change. Several recent conceptual works have used an ecosystem service approach to highlight the importance of soils to the sustained prosperity and welfare of humankind [1,2,3,4]. Decreases in the supply of soil ecosystem services like water quality regulation and soil structure stabilization are symptomatic both of ongoing loss of soil natural capital and of ongoing disregard of the full range of soil services in production systems [3, 4]. Priority services are identified as those that offer the greatest benefit within that landscape context but that act as likely “surrogates” for the provision
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