Scenarios for providing multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity in viticultural landscapes
Vineyards produce more than wine
Scenarios for providing multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity in viticultural landscapes
The SECBIVIT project will investigate the effects of inter-row management and pest control intensity within landscapes differing in structural diversity on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision. The consortium will develop spatially explicit agent-based models on the social-ecological system for viticulture. These models describe winegrowers as agents who take farming decisions and thereby influence the vineyard and surrounding landscape in various European viticultural regions from Spain to Romania. Â The aim is to model the effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services to determine optimal land use strategies in viticultural landscapes.
Background
Agriculture needs to better balance productivity while minimising negative impacts on the environment for meeting the sustainable development goals. One means to achieve this balance is by replacing external inputs (e.g. agro-chemicals), with ecological functions provided by biodiversity within the agroecosystem. As ecosystem services are co-produced by people and nature in agricultural landscapes, these ’social-ecological systems’ are shaped by current and past political and management decisions at different spatial scales. A great challenge for ES research, is to better understand synergies and trade-offs among ES across spatiotemporal scales, and how stakeholders balance multiple ES in their management decisions.
Objectives
SECBIVIT will pursue four main scientific objectives:
develop spatially explicit and locally adapted ABMs based on existing data and stakeholder-driven scenarios integrating winegrowers as agents who take land use decisions in coupled human-natural systems
develop a model that quantifies multiple biodiversity-related ES and their interactions in viticultural landscapes to identify pareto-optimal land use management strategies under the current socio-economic system
quantify effects of local and landscape-scale land-use decisions on multiple ES such as pest control and carbon sequestration to validate the model for analysing trade-offs and synergies between biodiversity and ES under different ecological, economic and market conditions
implement a software decision-support tool for stakeholders in viticulture that provides information on how to manage their crop to enhance biodiversity and multiple ES in a given context.
Funding
Together with the Belmont Forum, BiodivERsA launched a call to support research on scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services. This international call gathered 26 funding agencies from 23 countries and was co-funded by the European Commission.
Contact
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna
Gregor-Mendel-Str. 33
A-1180 Vienna
