Fragmentation and thresholds in hydrological flow‐based ecosystem services

Loss and fragmentation of natural land cover due to expansion of agricultural areas is a global issue. These changes alter the configuration and composition of the landscape, particularly affecting those ecosystem services (benefits people receive from ecosystems) that depend on interactions between landscape components. Hydrological mitigation describes the bundle of ecosystem services provided by landscape features such as woodland that interrupt the flow of runoff to rivers. These services include sediment retention, nutrient retention and mitigation of overland water flow. The position of woodland in the landscape and the landscape topography are both important for hydrological mitigation. Therefore, it is crucial to consider landscape configuration and flow pathways in a spatially explicit manner when examining the impacts of fragmentation. Here we test the effects of landscape configuration using a large number (>7,000) of virtual landscape configurations. We created virtual landscapes of woodland patches within grassland, superimposed onto real topography and stream networks. Woodland patches were generated with user‐defined combinations of patch number and total woodland area, placed randomly in the landscape. The Ecosystem Service model used hydrological routing to map the “mitigated area” upslope of each woodland patch. We found that more fragmented woodland mitigated a greater proportion of the catchment. Larger woodland area also increased mitigation, however, this increase was nonlinear, with a threshold at 50% coverage, above which there was a decline in service provision. This nonlinearity suggests that the benefit of any additional woodland depends on two factors: the level of fragmentation and the existing area of woodland. Edge density (total edge of patches divided by area of catchment) was the best single metric in predicting mitigated area. Distance from woodland to stream was not a significant predictor of mitigation, suggesting that agri‐environment schemes planting riparian woodland should consider additional controls such as the amount of fragmentation in the landscape. These findings highlight the potential benefits of fragmentation to hydrological mitigation services. However, benefits for hydrological services must be balanced against any negative effects of fragmentation or habitat loss on biodiversity and other services

Indicators of biodiversity in agroecosystems: insights from Article 17 of the Habitat Directive and IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

In the current decade, the main goals for biodiversity conservation and environmental protection at the level of the European Union are set in the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020: halting biodiversity loss and restoring ecosystem services. A key requirement for the implementation of the Strategy in terms of targeting measures and funds, and monitoring trends is the construction of a biodiversity knowledge base, including spatially explicit information on biodiversity distribution and ecosystem condition. The work presented in this report is based on the analysis of two primary datasets on biodiversity and habitat status. The first one is the Habitats assessment carried out by EU Members States under Art.17 of the Habitats and Birds Directive. Information reported by Member States is analysed to derive the links between pressures and conservation status, showing that agriculture-related habitats have, on average, a worse conservation status when compared to other habitats. Consequently, threats and pressures having most influenced the status of the agricultural-related habitats can be identified. The second one is the global dataset on species threat status elaborated by The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Spatially explicit representations of species distribution, status and richness across the EU 28 are provided, and most importantly the identification of wide geographic variables linked to ecological theory is presented, that explain to a large extent the continental trend in species richness. Finally, an example is presented of how the two exploited datasets can be jointly used by cross-tabulating data on habitats assessments and species threat status in a spatially explicit way at 10 km resolution, aiming at identifying hotspots were policy intervention is needed

2018 - Drought and Water Crisis in Southern Africa

The results presented in this short technical report are focused on the 2018 Water Crisis that affected the Western Cape Province in South Africa. In one side it includes an analysis carried out by the JRC´s "Disaster Risk Management" Unit and the Global Drought Observatory (GDO report), which periodically provides an overview of precipitation patterns and its anomalies, including also those related to vegetation greenness and soil moisture values respect to the long term average. In the other, it presents a complementary section carried out by the WEFE4DEV Work Package of the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) Project which contributes to the online African Atlas on WEFE Cooperation. The analysis is focused on the medium to long term spatio-temporal patterns and behaviour of precipitation and temperature patterns. Both help the community to better understand the exceptional character of these phonomena, their periodicity and the scale at which these events occur. The outcomes are helpful for policymakers to identify current and future issues that impact water management, food and energy security in Africa, as well as they providevaluable information to better define mitigation measures, resilience and adaptation policies.JRC.D.2-Water and Marine Resource

Comparing strengths and weaknesses of three ecosystem services modelling tools in a diverse UK river catchment

Ecosystem services modelling tools can help land managers and policy makers evaluate the impacts of alternative management options or changes in land use on the delivery of ecosystem services. As the variety and complexity of these tools increases, there is a need for comparative studies across a range of settings, allowing users to make an informed choice. Using examples of provisioning and regulating services (water supply, carbon storage and nutrient retention), we compare three spatially explicit tools – LUCI (Land Utilisation and Capability Indicator), ARIES (Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services) and InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs). Models were parameterised for the UK and applied to a temperate catchment with widely varying land use in North Wales. Although each tool provides quantitative mapped output, can be applied in different contexts, and can work at local or national scale, they differ in the approaches taken and underlying assumptions made. In this study, we focus on the wide range of outputs produced for each service and discuss the differences between each modelling tool. Model outputs were validated using empirical data for river flow, carbon and nutrient levels within the catchment. The sensitivity of the models to land-use change was tested using four scenarios of varying severity, evaluating the conversion of grassland habitat to woodland (0–30% of the landscape). We show that, while the modelling tools provide broadly comparable quantitative outputs, each has its own unique features and strengths. Therefore the choice of tool depends on the study question

Climate and land-use change impact on faecal indicator bacteria in a temperate maritime catchment (the River Conwy, Wales)

Water-borne pathogen contamination from untreated sewage effluent and runoff from farms is a serious threat to the use of river water for drinking and commercial purposes, such as downstream estuarine shellfish industries. In this study, the impact of climate change and land-use change on the presence of faecal indicator bacteria in freshwater was evaluated, through the use of a recently-developed catchment-scale pathogen model. The River Conwy in Wales has been used as a case-study, because of the large presence of livestock in the catchment and the importance of the shellfish harvesting activities in its estuary. The INCA-Pathogens catchment model has been calibrated through the use of a Monte-Carlo-based technique, based on faecal indicator bacteria measurements, and then driven by an ensemble of climate projections obtained from the HadRM3-PPE model (Future Flow Climate) plus four land-use scenarios (current land use, managed ecosystem, abandonment and agricultural intensification). The results show that climate change is not expected to have a very large impact on average river flow, although it might alter its seasonality. The abundance of faecal indicator bacteria is expected to decrease in response to climate change, especially during the summer months, due to reduced precipitation, causing reduced runoff, and increased temperature, which enhances the bacterial die-off processes. Land-use change can also have a potentially large impact on pathogens. The “managed ecosystems” scenario proposed in this study can cause a reduction of 15% in average water faecal indicator bacteria and up to 30% in the 90th percentile of water faecal indicator bacteria, mainly due to the conversion of pasture land into grassland and the expansion of forest land. This study provides an example of how to assess the impacts of human interventions on the landscape, and what may be the extent of their effects, for other catchments where the human use of the natural resources in the uplands can jeopardise the use of natural resources downstream

How will climate change pathways and mitigation options alter incidence of vector-borne diseases? A framework for leishmaniasis in South and Meso-America

The enormous global burden of vector-borne diseases disproportionately affects poor people in tropical, developing countries. Changes in vector-borne disease impacts are often linked to human modification of ecosystems as well as climate change. For tropical ecosystems, the health impacts of future environmental and developmental policy depend on how vector-borne disease risks trade off against other ecosystem services across heterogeneous landscapes. By linking future socio-economic and climate change pathways to dynamic land use models, this study is amongst the first to analyse and project impacts of both land use and climate change on continental-scale patterns in vector-borne diseases. Models were developed for cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis in the Americas—ecologically complex sand fly borne infections linked to tropical forests and diverse wild and domestic mammal hosts. Both diseases were hypothesised to increase with available interface habitat between forest and agricultural or domestic habitats and with mammal biodiversity. However, landscape edge metrics were not important as predictors of leishmaniasis. Models including mammal richness were similar in accuracy and predicted disease extent to models containing only climate and land use predictors. Overall, climatic factors explained 80% and land use factors only 20% of the variance in past disease patterns. Both diseases, but especially cutaneous leishmaniasis, were associated with low seasonality in temperature and precipitation. Since such seasonality increases under future climate change, particularly under strong climate forcing, both diseases were predicted to contract in geographical extent to 2050, with cutaneous leishmaniasis contracting by between 35% and 50%. Whilst visceral leishmaniasis contracted slightly more under strong than weak management for carbon, biodiversity and ecosystem services, future cutaneous leishmaniasis extent was relatively insensitive to future alternative socio-economic pathways. Models parameterised at narrower geographical scales may be more sensitive to land use pattern and project more substantial changes in disease extent under future alternative socio-economic pathways

Annual Progress Report of the European and Global Drought Observatories

With this report, the reader finds an overview of the changes, upgrades and new features created in the European Drought Observatory (EDO) and the Global Drought Observatory (GDO) and made in 2019. The year proved relatively quiet concerning drought events in Europe; the subcontinent was only affected in the Baltics, although fires broke out vigorously in the Balkans, Spain and Russia. Thanks to the recent juvenile concern with regard to the heating up of the climate, drought events and forest fires drew more public-attention. Our reaction upon this concern in the Global Drought Observatory is the development of a new group of data, which we call Drought Mitigation. With more people genuinely concerned in the effect of our alternation of the properties of the lower atmosphere, we take up the task to provide guidelines for repair and adaptation. Higher temperatures imply that air depletes more vapour from vegetation and soil, leading to more intense droughts or floods. Consient management of our fresh water resources and massive tree planting are measures that can have significant impact on the effects of a Drought, Forest Fires or also Flood events. Therefore, we started with including the results of the often-cited research result regarding reforestation potential of the Crowther Lab as a layer in the Global Drought Observatory. We completed our work with enriching data describing dams with data regarding the location, name and quantitative characteristics of dams as an additional layer. We worked on the integration of the GRACE Dataset, which gives us an actualized satellite born, insight in the depletion of groundwater resources. We created a new index, alerting drought impacts on protected wetlands. Droughts events in these areas might affect rare species living in these protected wetlands, thus creating a link to the biodiversity crisis. The drought alerting mechanism we developed thus far were human centred. With this new index and with the Crowther Lab reforestation inventory we hope to correct this one species view of the past, learning to share our territory with all species, also during hard times of a drought disaster. With these additions, we hope that EDO and GDO will give you a better overview of the impacts of drought events, not only for our economy but also for our shared ecosystems and their services to us. Finally note that we engage in a project to export EDO and GDO knowledge and software to African regional partners. Thus enabling them to set up drought observatories in Africa just as if we did for South- and Central America. Such a collaboration works both ways, we understand better the impacts of Drought events in their region and we learn from their practical skills with regard to make things work in a challenging environment, whilst we can give them working drought observatory software, practical manners to, almost, fully automate the filling and updating of the systems combined with our specific expertise on droughts build up in the last 12 years.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen