Assessing ecological and social uncertainty in the evaluation of land-use impacts on ecosystem services

Abstract

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.