Modeling the effect of management under environmental change on the environmental impact and provided services of an ecosystem: a case study of a Scots pine forest

There is a need to predict the responses of ecosystems and their provided services to management practices under changing environmental conditions via ecosystem models and use tools to compare the estimated provided services between the different scenarios. However, scientific articles have covered a limited amount of estimated ecosystem services and have used tools to aggregate services that contain a significant amount of subjective aspects and that represent the final result in a non-tangible unit such as U+2018pointsU+2019. To resolve these matters, this study improves and applies tools to assess the environmental impact (e.g. on human health) in physical units and ecosystem services, based on monetary valuation (including ecosystem disservices with associated negative monetary values). These approaches and improvements, relevant to all ecosystems, are demonstrated using a Scots pine stand from 2010 to 2089 for a combination of three environmental change and three management scenarios. The environmental change scenarios considered interannual climate variability trends and included alterations in temperature, precipitation, nitrogen deposition, wind speed, Particulate matter (PM) concentration and CO2 concentration. The addressed flows/ecosystem services, including disservices, are as follows: particulate matter removal, freshwater loss, CO2 sequestration, wood production, NOx emissions, NH3 uptake and nitrogen pollution/removal. The monetary ecosystem service valuation yields a total average estimate of 361-1242 euro ha-1 yr-1. PM2.5 (< 2.5 µm) removal is the key service, with a projected value of 622-1172 euro ha-1 yr-1. Concerning environmental impact assessment, with net CO2 uptake being the most relevant contributing flow, a loss prevention of 0.014-0.029 healthy life years ha-1 yr-1 is calculated for the respective flows. Both assessment methods favor the use of the least intensive management scenario due to its resulting higher CO2 sequestration and PM removal, which are the most important services of the considered ones.

Jaar van publicatie:2016