Highlights
We present scenarios for European agriculture and food systems: the Eur-Agri-SSPs.
The five Eur-Agri-SSPs describe plausible and consistent developments until 2050.
We followed a nine-step protocol to ensure a systematic and transparent process.
European stakeholders provided regional and thematic details and valuable feedback.
The Eur-Agri-SSPs can inform integrated assessments, education, and policy making.
Land-use change has been identified as one the most important processes to understand and to model global change. It is the result of complex interactions between human and environmental driving factors. A key to capturing this complexity is the analytical framework of land systems as coupled human-environment systems, a concept that is a central component of the science plan of the Global Land Project. Based on this framework, this paper presents an overview of eight integrated models of the land system. The review concentrates on model approaches that include processes of both the human and the environment sub-system and which operate in a spatially explicit manner on a regional to global scale. Another criterion used to select models is that they take into account interplay and competition between different land-use activities, e.g. between agriculture and urban development. Each model is reviewed separately in detail with focus on the different aspects of the land system that are represented within the model and on the implemented modelling concepts. This is done by systematically addressing the following topics: model purpose and application, model concepts for the human sub-system and for the environment sub-system and linkages between the sub-systems (model integration). Based on these findings commonalities and differences between the models are discussed and further research needs are identified.
Conservation efforts are increasingly supported by ecosystem service assessments. These assessments depend on complex multi-disciplinary methods, and rely on a number of assumptions which reduce complexity. If assumptions are ambiguous or inadequate, misconceptions and misinterpretations may arise when interpreting results of assessments. An interdisciplinary understanding of assumptions in ecosystem service science is needed to provide consistent conservation recommendations. Here, we synthesise and elaborate on 12 prevalent types of assumptions in ecosystem service assessments. These comprise conceptual and ethical foundations of the ecosystem service concept, assumptions on data collection, indication, mapping, and modelling, on socio-economic valuation and value aggregation, as well as about using assessment results for decision-making. We recommend future assessments to increase transparency about assumptions, and to test and validate them and their potential consequences on assessment reliability. This will support the taking up of assessment results in conservation science, policy and practice.
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