Shaping the European Alps: Trends in landscape patterns, biodiversity and ecosystem services

Abstract

Landscape appearance is controlled by a range of different environmental and human-induced factors, although there is still a lack of knowledge about the significance of individual factors. Our goal was to identify the factors that were significant for landscape change in the European Alps and to rank them according to their importance. Therefore, we mapped landscape change with a standardized survey methodology in six typical socio-ecological regions with strongly differing socio-economic and natural conditions. The results clearly showed that significant landscape change has taken place in all regions over the last 150–200 years, affecting biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES). In general, the areas used for agriculture have decreased in all regions, particularly the traditionally used forms (−72.7 % to −6.9 %). The greatest decrease took place in the high elevation, agriculturally unfavourable areas (-72.6 % to −41.6 %) and regions with weak economic conditions (−62.9 % to −20.9 %). The forest has spread on a large scale on the abandoned land in economically strong regions but also settlements and monotone and intensively used cultures. As a consequence of the landscape changes, plant species diversity declined, particularly in favourable regions with a good site and economic conditions (−62.7 % to −7.2 %), while it decreased far less in the economically unfavourable regions (−20.1 % to −0.7 %). Regulation & maintenance and cultural ESs have also decreased, whereas provisioning ES generally increased. Our results also showed 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 analysing impacts on ecosystem services can be a valuable guide to sustainable decision-making processes.