The Importance of Spatial Configuration When Restoring Intensive Production Landscapes for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Multifunctionality

作者：Daniel R. Richards, Thomas R. Etherington, Alexander Herzig, Sandra Lavorel · 发表于：Land · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.3390/land13040460 · 被引用次数：10 · 研究领域：Land Use and Ecosystem Services、Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management

Intensive production landscapes provide low levels of many ecosystem services and support limited biodiversity, so they require restoration to enhance their multifunctionality. International guidelines suggest that restoration should aim to establish natural woody vegetation cover across 30% of landscapes. Such restoration may be implemented in varied spatial configurations and complemented by additional land use changes from intensive to extensive semi-natural pastoral grasslands. To restore multifunctional landscapes, we need to understand the impacts of restoration spatial configuration and complementary grassland extensification, both in isolation and in combination. We used a virtual landscape simulation to systematically analyse the impacts of alternative restoration strategies on the provision of nine indicators of ecosystem services and biodiversity, and the overall multifunctionality of the landscapes. All restored landscapes achieved improvements in the performance of individual ecosystem services and multifunctionality compared to the baseline. The benefits of a given restored natural vegetation effort were increased by adding extensive grassland and modifying the spatial configuration of restoration. Randomly distributed patterns of restoration provided higher multifunctionality than restoration adjacent to existing natural areas or as large land blocks. The virtual landscape approach allowed systematic exploration of alternative restoration strategies, providing ...