Ecosystem services in mountain pastures: A complex network of site conditions, climate and management

作者：Caren M. Pauler, Hermel Homburger, A. Lüscher, Michael Scherer‐Lorenzen, Manuel K. Schneider · 发表于：Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1016/j.agee.2024.109272 · 被引用次数：11 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Land Use and Ecosystem Services、Pasture and Agricultural Systems

Mountain pastures offer a multitude of ecosystem services (ES) such as fodder for ruminants, habitat for pollinators, climate change mitigation, aesthetic landscape for recreation, and biodiversity conservation. We aimed at analysing to which extend these ES are influenced by small-scale gradients of climate, site conditions and management – and to disentangle relationships among ES and the factors influencing them. Therefore, we quantified ES on six mountain summer farms in two contrasting regions in Switzerland: the Northern Alpine Foothills (lower elevation, higher precipitation, calcareous bedrock) and the Eastern Central Alps (higher elevation, lower precipitation, silicious bedrock). We measured six ES indicators (forage quantity, forage quality, carbon storage, colour abundance, resources for pollinators, plant diversity) and related them to explanatory factors of climate (temperature and precipitation), site conditions (soil fertility, soil acidity, terrain slope) and management (local grazing intensity, remoteness) in 66 study plots, i.e., 11 per farm. A holistic picture of the complex relationships among these factors was drawn by various statistical approaches: allometric line fitting, variance partitioning, and structural equations modelling. We found a huge heterogeneity of ES indicators and explanatory factors on each farm: the variability within farms was even higher than between regions. Variance partitioning and structural equations modelling demonstrated str...