Linking ecological and socio-economic changes to assess impacts of global change on landscape and ecosystem services in the European Alps

Abstract

Mountain landscapes, shaped by human activities over centuries, are facing significant transformations in the European Alps, mainly due to the abandonment of formerly managed areas. Their compressed topography and vertical gradients make them particularly vulnerable to global change. However, mountain landscapes and ecosystems contribute crucially to ecosystem services for people living inside and outside these areas. We will present the dynamic of land-use change for the past 150 years in eight different agrarian structure regions in the Alps and investigate the role of different land-use types, including their land-use intensities, on the supply capacity and flow of provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services. We will illustrate that the regional framework conditions play a much more important role in landscape development in the European Alps than national frameworks. Higher “green subsidies” reduced the intensification trend in agriculture, but also led to increased abandonment. In addition, the landscape also remained more diverse, biodiversity declined less, and many ecosystem services increased. This demonstrates that interpreting historical landscape dynamics and analyzing impacts on ecosystem services using a cross-sectoral approach can be a valuable guide to sustainable decision-making processes in order to enhance landscape resilience. Finally, we will discuss the results of several studies that assessed future grasslands and forest development under different climate, management, and disturbance scenarios and the resulting changes in service supply. It will be shown that up to the 2050s, socio-economically driven land-use changes and legacy effects will have a more significant influence, whereas afterward, accelerating climate change will become the more important driver of changes. However, the ability of management to control ecosystem service supply decreases sharply with the severity of future climate change if no decisive actions to mitigate climate change are taken. Hence, climate change may severely hamper the management of mountain ecosystems, but value-based visions of local communities may help define appropriate adaption pathways.