Suchergebnisse

Ecosystem services provided by semi-natural agro-ecosystems in Europe are vulnerable to land-use change. Typically, vulnerability assessments include uncertainty around the future political and economic context of land-use systems through the use of scenarios. Here, we use a novel indicator sequence to assess the acceptability of scenario impacts on ecosystem properties to social representations of ecosystem services in a case study area. The sequence can incorporate multiple sources of uncertainty, and we highlight the key role of plant dispersal in driving ecosystem service provision by comparing outcomes from different methods for projecting scenario impact on ecosystem properties. By varying which properties underly valued ecosystem services and by comparing how people could adapt their future demand for ecosystem services we also incorporate social uncertainty. We find that social representations most negatively affected by litter accumulation are the most vulnerable.

Ecosystem services provided by semi-natural agro-ecosystems in Europe are vulnerable to land-use change. Typically, vulnerability assessments include uncertainty around the future political and economic context of land-use systems through the use of scenarios. Here, we use a novel indicator sequence to assess the acceptability of scenario impacts on ecosystem properties to social representations of ecosystem services in a case study area. The sequence can incorporate multiple sources of uncertainty, and we highlight the key role of plant dispersal in driving ecosystem service provision by comparing outcomes from different methods for projecting scenario impact on ecosystem properties. By varying which properties underly valued ecosystem services and by comparing how people could adapt their future demand for ecosystem services we also incorporate social uncertainty. We find that social representations most negatively affected by litter accumulation are the most vulnerable.

Understanding how changes in ecosystem properties feedback into land-use decisions remains relatively uncharted territory for land science in general and for ecosystem service science in particular. In Europe, debates on rural development can be framed in terms of opposing socio-political discourses. These include formulations of desirable, acceptable and unacceptable changes that contribute to changing the planning- and policy-based drivers of land-use decisions. We explored the relationships between such discourses and local descriptions of a mountain grassland area in the central French Alps documented using semi-structured interviews. We found that descriptions focused on either the (1) productive functions of the local grasslands, (2) the aesthetic qualities of the surrounding landscape or (3) its cultural heritage value (testimony to past land-use patterns and practices). We interpreted these descriptions as social representations and found that they were unequally represented in existing socio-political discourses identified at the European level, thus illustrating some strong political barriers between local perceptions of landscape changes and the policy drivers of those changes.

Understanding how changes in ecosystem properties feedback into land-use decisions remains relatively uncharted territory for land science in general and for ecosystem service science in particular. In Europe, debates on rural development can be framed in terms of opposing socio-political discourses. These include formulations of desirable, acceptable and unacceptable changes that contribute to changing the planning- and policy-based drivers of land-use decisions. We explored the relationships between such discourses and local descriptions of a mountain grassland area in the central French Alps documented using semi-structured interviews. We found that descriptions focused on either the (1) productive functions of the local grasslands, (2) the aesthetic qualities of the surrounding landscape or (3) its cultural heritage value (testimony to past land-use patterns and practices). We interpreted these descriptions as social representations and found that they were unequally represented in existing socio-political discourses identified at the European level, thus illustrating some strong political barriers between local perceptions of landscape changes and the policy drivers of those changes.