Land-use intensity alters networks between biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and services

Abstract

Land-use intensification can increase provisioning ecosystem services, such as food and timber production, but it also drives changes in ecosystem functioning and biodiversity loss, which may ultimately compromise human wellbeing. To understand how changes in land-use intensity affect the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and services, we built networks from correlations between the species richness of 16 trophic groups, 10 ecosystem functions, and 15 ecosystem services. We evaluated how the properties of these networks varied across land-use intensity gradients for 150 forests and 150 grasslands. Land-use intensity significantly affected network structure in both habitats. Changes in connectance were larger in forests, while changes in modularity and evenness were more evident in grasslands. Our results show that increasing land-use intensity leads to more homogeneous networks with less integration within modules in both habitats, driven by the belowground compartment in grasslands, while forest responses to land management were more complex. Land-use intensity strongly altered hub identity and module composition in both habitats, showing that the positive correlations of provisioning services with biodiversity and ecosystem functions found at low land-use intensity levels, decline at higher intensity levels. Our approach provides a comprehensive view of the relationships between multiple components of biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services and how they respond to land use. This can be used to identify overall changes in the ecosystem, to derive mechanistic hypotheses, and it can be readily applied to further global change drivers.

Analysis of complex trophic networks reveals the signature of land-use intensification on soil communities in agroecosystems

“…Reduced diversity of interactions may stem from less structurally-complex habitats, and shifts in environmental and/or biotic filtering under intensive management practices 34 , 35 . Decreases in trophic network complexity are considered to have repercussions for community stability and soil functioning in a changing environment 31 , and recent work with combined above- and belowground trophic groups has also demonstrated linkages between network complexity and the provision of ecosystem services 36 .…”

Stewardship and analysis of big Earth observation data

“…Big Earth observation (EO) data have played an important role in fields such as quantifying global forest changes (Hansen et al, 2014), tracking global urban expansion (Liu et al, 2019), and mapping land use and land cover (Felipe-Lucia et al, 2020). It is becoming more and more obvious that big EO data is an important asset, which means that there is an urgent need to develop effective data-stewardship tools and advanced analytical techniques to make the best use of big EO data.…”

Experimental evaluation of herbicide use on biodiversity, ecosystem services and timber production trade‐offs in forest plantations

“…A growing body of research indicates that biodiversity promotes ecosystem functioning (Cardinale et al 2012), and consensus is emerging that biodiversity loss reduces the efficiency by which ecosystems produce biomass, store carbon, and recycle nutrients (Felipe-Lucia et al 2020).…”

“…Management objectives that focus on producing a narrow range of ecosystem services may therefore trade off against a variety of other ecosystem services (Martin-Lopez et al 2014;Felipe-Lucia et al 2020). Timber production constitutes an economically quantifiable ecosystem service and, as the global demand for wood products increases, more forestland is predicted to be under high-production intensive forest management (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2018).…”