Historical legacies of land use decisions on ecosystem services

The new paper titled, ”Modeling how land use legacy affects the provision of ecosystem services in Mediterranean southern Spain,” takes an innovative approach to exploring the consequences of land use decisions.

The authors of this new paper in Environmental Research Letters have a unique approach to exploring the ecosystem service provision protentional at the regional scale. They use current and historical land use information to map land use trajectories, such as, agricultural intensification, afforestation, rural abandonment, and deforestation. They then use these trajectories to investigate their effect on current ecosystem service provision.

This approach is important for two reasons. First, it can help explain the variation of ecosystem service provision within a given land use category. The ability of a forest to provide a whole suite of ecosystem services is different if that forest was formerly cropland or was always forest, for example. Second, the method used in this paper can help further the understanding of the implications of land use decisions made today and their impacts on the future ecosystem service supply.

The paper can be found here.

Juan Miguel Requena-Mullor, Quintas-Soriano, C., Brandt, J., Cabello, J., Castro, A. 2018. Modeling how land use legacy affects the provision of ecosystem services in Mediterranean southern Spain. Environ. Res. Lett. in press https://doi.org/10.1088/1748- 9326/aae5e3