Interface project: relationships among landscape structure, ecological processes, biodiversity and ecosystem services

Abstract

Faced with the challenge of planning multifunctional landscapes to ensure the retention of both original biological diversity and ecosystem functions, as well as agricultural production, this project aims to investigate how parameters of landscape structure directly or indirectly regulates key ecosystem services through influencing a series of distinct ecological processes. As ecosystem service regulation studies have principally been conducted either at local scales (via experimental manipulations), or rather at global scales (correlative, proxy-based mapping studies), there is a knowledge gap at the intermediate scale of landscape, which permits the exploration of such regulatory mechanisms with both enhanced precision and power to extrapolate results to other spatial scales and systems. We aim to contribute to an improved understanding of how habitat loss influences these ecosystem services, and specifically investigate the likelihood of both thresholds and trade-offs in service provision. We will do this by relating rates and stocks measurements of key ecosystem services, including regulatory (i.e. pollination, pest and disease control, hydrologic flow regulation and water quality), provisioning (i.e. water storage) and supportive services (i.e. carbon stocks) with parameters associated with landscape structure, including the proportion of native habitat in the landscape, the proximity and number of edges between native vegetation and agricultural areas, and landscape composition. With a sampling design that couples spatially explicit ecosystem services measurements, biodiversity sampling of species responsible for service provisioning, and manipulated field experiments, we can identify how ecological processes acting at the landscape level (e.g. connectivity, edge effects, and habitat complementation and supplementation) influence and control the provision of key ecosystem services. By considering these relationships for 40 landscapes located in distinct agricultural matrices (i.e. coffee, extensive cattle pasture, and eucalyptus), within a highly biodiverse and threatened biome (Brazil's Atlantic Rainforest), we can assess the generality of these relationships, compare landscape-service relationships for multiple services across within the same matrix type, as well as single service across different matrices. It is expected that: (i) regulating and supporting ecosystem services demonstrate non-linear threshold dynamics along gradients of habitat loss, similarly to those observed for biodiversity, (ii) these thresholds are governed by a series of ecological processes related to both movement patterns of the biodiversity associated with service provision, and changes (usually non-linear) in landscape configuration associated with habitat loss, and (iii) that thresholds in service decline occur later (i.e. at lower levels of forest cover) for those landscapes with more forested matrix habitat. Taken together, these related datasets will provide a critical scientific subsidy to ongoing political land-use planning processes, and the maintenance of ecosystem services in the working agricultural landscapes of the Atlantic Rainforest. (AU)