Abstract
Agriculture and natural systems interweave in the southeastern US, including Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, where topographic, edaphic, hydrologic, and climatic gradients form nuanced landscapes. These are largely working lands under private control, comprising mosaics of timberlands, grazinglands, and croplands. According to the “ecosystem services” framework, these landscapes are multifunctional. Generally, working lands are highly valued for their provisioning services, and to some degree cultural services, while regulating and supporting services are harder to quantify and less appreciated. Trade-offs and synergies exist among these services. Regional ecological assessments tend to broadly paint working lands as low value for regulating and supporting services. But this generalization fails to consider the complexity and tight spatial coupling of land uses and land covers evident in such regions. The challenge of evaluating multifunctionality and ecosystem services is that they are not spatially concordant. While there are significant acreages of natural systems embedded in southeastern working lands, their spatial characteristics influence the balance of tradeoffs between ecosystem services at differing scales. To better understand this, we examined the configuration of working lands in the southeastern US by comparing indicators of ecosystem services at multiple scales. Indicators included measurements of net primary production (provisioning), agricultural Nitrogen runoff (regulating), habitat measured at three levels of land use intensity, and biodiversity (supporting). We utilized a hydrographic and ecoregional framework to partition the study region. We compared indicators aggregated at differing scales, ranging from broad ecoregions to local landscapes focused on the USDA Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Network sites in Florida and Georgia. Subregions of the southeastern US differ markedly in contributions to overall ecosystem services. Provisioning services, characterized by production indicators, were very high in northern subregions of Georgia, while supporting services, characterized by habitat and biodiversity indicators, were notably higher in smaller subregions of Florida. For supporting services, the combined contributions of low intensity working lands with embedded natural systems made a critical difference in their regional evaluation. This analysis demonstrated how the inclusion of working lands combined with examining these at different scales shifted our understanding of ecosystem services trade-offs and synergies in the southeastern United States.
Highlights
In the southeastern United States, including Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, natural systems are largely embedded and tightly coupled with more intensive land uses: timber harvesting is common in “natural” upland and riparian areas that function as important habitat; pastures often include ponds and wetlands; and agricultural fields, irrigated and dry land, provide open foraging sites for wildlife inhabiting adjacent grassed and forested riparian areas
Trade-offs and synergies in ecosystem services occur within and across all landscapes, including working lands, and understanding them requires their alignment by selecting services that can be measured consistently at all scales, and identifying a useful grain for aggregating at meaningful common scales. We address these questions for working lands in the southeastern US: What are the ecosystem services associated with working lands? How do characteristics and variability of ecosystem services change as the focus is shifted from one spatial scale to the next? What are the tradeoffs among ecosystem services and does the nature of the tradeoffs change with scale? To respond, we conceptualized pairwise relationships among provisioning, regulating, and supporting services at various scales (Figure 1, Supplementary Table 1.1)
Optimization requires a better understanding of the contributions of working lands toward multifunctional ecosystem services at local, regional and national scales (Petersen and Snapp, 2015)
Summary
In the southeastern United States (southeastern US, or Southeast), including Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, natural systems are largely embedded and tightly coupled with more intensive land uses: timber harvesting is common in “natural” upland and riparian areas that function as important habitat; pastures often include ponds and wetlands; and agricultural fields, irrigated and dry land, provide open foraging sites for wildlife inhabiting adjacent grassed and forested riparian areas. Southeastern “working landscapes,” with less intensive land uses and embedded natural areas provide an array of ecosystem services including provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Characterization of the values and dynamics of these ecosystem services provides insight into an understanding of how to accomplish sustainable intensification of US agriculture. This endeavor is critical to meeting the production demands of future populations while conserving soil, water and biological resources on working lands (Kleinman et al, 2018; Spiegal et al, 2018), work that is being undertaken at a national scale by the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Network. Agricultural ecosystems in the US are recognized as providing a variety of ecosystem services, such as soil and water quality, carbon sequestration, biodiversity and cultural, they are
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