Where to put things? Spatial land management to sustain biodiversity and economic returns

Abstract

Expanding human population and economic growth have lead to large-scale conversion of natural habitat to human-dominated landscapes with consequent large-scale declines in biodiversity. Conserving biodiversity, while at the same time meeting expanding human needs, is an issue of utmost importance. In this paper we develop a spatially explicit landscape-level model for analyzing the biological and economic consequences of alternative land-use patterns. The spatially-explicit biological model incorporates habitat preferences, area requirements and dispersal ability between habitat patches for terrestrial vertebrate species to predict the likely number of species that will be sustained on the landscape. The spatially explicit economic model incorporates site characteristics and location to predict economic returns in a variety of potential land uses. We use the model to search for efficient land-use patterns that maximize biodiversity conservation objectives for a given level of economic returns, and vice-versa. We apply the model to the Willamette Basin, Oregon, USA. By thinking carefully about the arrangement of activities, we find land-use patterns that sustain high biodiversity and economic returns. Compared to the current land-use pattern, we show that both biodiversity conservation and the value of economic activity could be increased substantially.

A review on trade-off analysis of ecosystem services for sustainable land-use management

“…To address the multiple-inputs/multiple outputs production functions, the efficiency frontier method has become popular (Grosskopf et al, 1992), which can be traced back to the ideas put forward by Farrell (Farrell, 1957). Specifically, the productive efficiency is treated as a relative concept, which can be illustrated as Pareto-efficient options for optimal utilization of two or more services, where the system cannot increase one service without sacrificing other services Polasky et al, 2008).…”

Managing water services in tropical regions: From land cover proxies to hydrologic fluxes

“…As a result, similar land uses or land covers may have diverse effects on water services across space and time (Ponette-González et al 2010). The location and topography (e.g., elevation, aspect) of a target area, as well as its position relative to other land covers, influence the extent to which interventions will be effective (Polasky et al 2008). Understanding the role of state factors is therefore critical to identify appropriate sites for intervention as well as management options for watershed investment programs.…”

Interactions between ecosystem properties and land use clarify spatial strategies to optimize trade-offs between agriculture and species conservation

“…In fact, former land uses were often characterized by shifting mosaics (Kleyer et al 2007). However, it is still an open question whether to arrange the mosaic in space and time so as to optimize the provisioning of service bundles on the landscape scale (Chan et al 2006;Willemen et al 2010) and optimization models are increasingly used to tackle this question (Seppelt & Voinov 2003;Polasky et al 2008;Schröter & Remme 2015).…”