EC21C

Europe is facing a biodiversity crisis brought on by a perfect storm of climatic and land-use pressures driving re-assortment of species assemblages and the disassociation of ecological functions. To mitigate against the effects of this crisis on biodiversity and human societies, we need an EU-wide understanding of species responses to global change, combined with a process-based understanding of the interactions between species, communities and ecosystems that generate biodiversity dynamics. Unfortunately, uniting both sets of knowledge in an integrated set of forecasts has proved elusive. Species distribution models (SDMs) are our most powerful tools for forecasting species responses to global change across Europe. They are thus ideal to assess relative levels of risk and allocate resources effectively. SDMs have been extensively explored and validated. However SDM forecasts are criticized for insufficient treatment of mechanisms that determine how species will be affected by global change: first, the demography, dispersal, and biotic interactions that determine population declines or range shifts; second, the interactions between drivers such as climate and land-use. Dynamic vegetation models (DVMs) on the other hand are the ideal tool with which to model the biogeochemical, hydrological and vegetation processes that are the foundation of the terrestrial ecosystems. Unlike SDMs, DVMs explicitly model competition and growth, and their interactions with both climate and land-use change. However, DVMs lack the generality of SDMs in that they are limited to a few species for which biophysiological traits are sufficiently known: currently only a few major European tree and shrub species. Species responses to global change are idiosyncratic, precluding comprehensive biodiversity forecasts based on DVMs alone. Thus, we propose to use DVMs and SDMs in tandem to predict European biodiversity trajectories, resilience and changes to ecosystem services. DVMs will be extended to forecast vegetation dynamics under actual landscape-scale socio-economic land-use forecasts, and to consider the combined effects of species dispersal and competition. Resilience and tipping points in ecosystem services will be analysed. This will provide for the first time realistic timelines of ecosystem service trajectories, suitable for landscape-scale management. DVM-integrated forecasts of vegetation and land-use change (land-cover) will be combined with dispersal into a sophisticated range-shift model (RSM) framework, for a wide range of EU taxa. This tackles key criticisms of SDMs (above). DVMs and SDMs will also be combined to forecasts the effects of ecosystem function change on biodiversity in situ and during range shifts. In summary, the above procedures will forecast the dynamic coupling between species and ecosystem responses to climate and land-use change, and identify resilience or tipping points throughout the 21st century. Conservation planning tools have tended to assume that protected area designation is our primary means of conservation. However, most land in Europe has multiple uses and hence cannot be designated as a single-purpose nature reserve, and the diffuse nature of global change impacts requires widespread action. Adaptive governance is required: multi-level and multi-purpose approaches that coordinate environmentally-linked policies to support resilient socio-ecological systems. To this end, the green infrastructure (GI) approach has been recently included in the EU Biodiversity strategy. GI integrates biodiversity considerations into all policies that have environmental impact.The goal is to create landscapes in which ecosystems, and the services they provide, have strong resilience. We will develop scenarios for GI at regional and local levels in a participatory process, first to test and provide a tool for local level decision support and second to make recommendations for EU policies.